Best Gambling Strategies

By Hank Blaine • June 30, 2023

No sports handicapper, casino bettor, or horse player can ensure success without a strategy. Developing and sticking to a betting strategy, no matter our pastime, is the best way to ensure profit. More importantly, it’s the best way to stay out of financial trouble. With that in mind, we’ve written down five sports gambling strategies that you can employ to manage risk and turn a profit.

Top 5 Gambling Strategies

1. Set your bet unit and stick to it

This is a good strategy if you’re starting out with a large bankroll. If you start your sports betting career with $5,000, you may want to stick with a unit. Then you begin to slowly build your bankroll by sticking to a unit bet.

We determine our unit bet based on our risk tolerance. The more tolerance for risk, the more we bet. If your risk-averse, keep your bet unit to a minimum. Sports betting is possible 365 days out of the year. So there’s no reason to cause unwarranted stress.

2. Bet a percentage of your bankroll and decrease when you reach a goal

If you start with a smaller bankroll, consider betting a percentage up to a goal. For example, let’s say you start with $300. You bet 20% of your bankroll up until you reach around $1,000.

Then, you lower your bet percentage from 20% to 15%. Once you reach $2,000, a huge accomplishment if you started with $300, lower your percentage to 10%. If you’re not risk-averse, keep it at 15%.

Think of the percentage as the dividends you are making on your sports betting stock portfolio. Doing so allows you to see sports betting in a different light, an investment point of view instead of a gambling point of view.

3. Go against the public

You won’t always win going against the public. You will make smarter bets in the long run if you always lean towards going against the public.

By lean, we mean handicapping public choices fully. The public is usually wrong. The public also loves to back chalk. So going against the public in many cases leads to better payouts and plays that have a much better chance of winning.

4. Use the baccarat method

In baccarat, it’s all about the trend. Trend betting is a strategy we touch upon next. The baccarat method is about seeing a number trend.

The baccarat method is best used in baseball and basketball betting where there are numerous options. What is it exactly?

Baccarat players look to see how many hands the player or banker has won. Then, they go opposite. We can do the same in baseball. Few teams win more than 3 to 4 in a row.

If a team does, it’s because they have the edge, usually, the streaking team has a pitching edge. In basketball, few teams win more than 3 to 4 as well. So using the baccarat method, calling the right time when a winning team’s streak ends, can lead to profit.

5. Create your betting lines based on trends

Trend betting is a strategy that can lead to winning bets. A tweak to the trend betting strategy is to use trends to create betting lines.

It’s important to note that a betting line’s goal is to attract action on both sides of a spread, which is why we often see overlay lines on underdogs and underlay lines on favorites. The public likes to bet on favorites. So oddsmakers set lines that make the chalk bad bets.

We can use trends to change those lines. For example, if a football team is 1-6 against the spread in road games but is a -3 road chalk in their upcoming game, we use the trend to adjust the line.

The team might be an overlay at -2, -1, or even money. If other factors boost the trend, perhaps the left tackle is injured, the road chalk could be a +3 choice on our line.

Once we create the line, we bet accordingly. In the above scenario, we would back the home underdog at +3.