Boxing Betting: Doing What the Bookie Wants You to Do
By Loot, Boxing Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
When wagering on boxing, there are things that the bookie wants us to do. We have to look at it like this: the bookie is the one who wins year after year. They're the ones with the money, trying to beat the players. They are the house. And to beat the house--you have to make sure you're not a tree limb being fed into a wood-chipper. In other words, you shouldn't do what the bookie wants you to do.
In all forms of sports betting, there are things the house would rather have you do and things they'd rather you not do. That is also true in boxing betting, where there are certain kinds of players the book would rather deal with. Obviously, it is in our best interest to steer clear of those things and become someone that makes the bookie worry.
It comes down to how you bet and what kind of wagers you make. The first thing the book wants you to do is bet on every fight. Since there is not a bettor's edge in all fights, a player who bets on almost every bout is really just a gambler using boxing as a canvas for his degeneracy. The bookie knows it's possible for them to be beaten by a betting man who selectively isolates only spots of great perceived advantage. The same concerns do not exist with a bettor who tries to slug it out with the book over every bout on the board.
A selective bettor waits for spots where he has a clear edge. Either he has a different read on a fighter or can detect that the odds on a given fight are out-of-whack. Then he acts accordingly, betting only when the edge is present. This bettor is isolating the terms of war to only the battles where he has a good chance to win.
If you try to win the war against the book by fighting every single battle, you're doing a lot of things wrong. You're not being selective enough. You're driven totally by opinion. You're stuck in the elementary concept of "Who is going to win this fight." You're not looking at odds and value, or how to maximize your edge. You're just picking fights.
The book wants you to do that. To counter the house's desire for you to not be selective when wagering, you must, guess what, BE SELECTIVE! Don't bet on a fight because it's going to be on TV. Don't bet on a fighter because you like him. Don't bet just for action's sake. Have high standards.
The book also wants you to bet exotically. Their job would be a lot harder if everyone simply made straight bets--wagers on simply who will win a fight. In the major fights, there are often a slew of prop bets--how a fighter will win, what round the fight will end, if there will be any knockdowns, etc. Not to mention the parlays a bettor can make.
There are really only two type of boxing bets you should regularly make--picking winners and over/unders. In other words, focus on who is going to win a fight or how long a fight might last. There can be great value found in both. When you stray from the paved road, the going can get a bit rough.
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The book wants bettors who think they have a crystal ball and can make overly-precise predictions. Like if you bet for a fighter to win in rounds 6 and 7 and he wins in round 8, your pick was actually pretty good, but you lost. You were trying to be too specific. You don't want to be in a position where your read on a fight was correct, but you shoot yourself in the foot by trying to be too exact. That's doing what the book wants you to do.
The book also wants you to be undiscriminating when looking for the right odds. They want you to pick a side and sign off on the odds without protest. What we should do when picking fights is come up with the odds we need before making the bet. If the odds do not correspond with that, we either leave it alone, look at the odds at another book, or wait for the number to come into our range. By becoming more demanding and selective, we can transform into an animal other than the hordes of sheep being fed to the slaughter year after year at the hands of the bookie.
