Unless they have billions in the bank like Bill Gates, most people are at least peripherally conscious of value in their day to day lives.  If one store has a six pack of Cokes for $2.99, and a store next door sells them for $3.99 it’s a no-brainer to save the dollar.  That’s magnified on purchases requiring a larger financial outlay.  Here in the Portland, Oregon area we don’t have a state sales tax.  10 minutes across the border in Washington they do.  For that reason, many value conscious Washingtonians will make a trip to buy a big ticket item like a car or a computer.  Most people are ‘hard wired’ to seek out the best value in day to day financial matters.

For some reason, however, that tendency doesn’t extend to gambling.  Here’s a real life example that clearly illustrates what we’re talking about:  a few years ago, I was in Las Vegas at the now defunct Stardust.  I had some time to kill before a game I’d bet on started, so I decided to play some video poker.  While looking for a machine with a favorable pay table, I saw something that has stuck with me since.  Two identical rows of $1 progressive video poker machines.  The exact same machines, except one offered a progressive jackpot of $1,200 for a royal flush—not much more than a non-progressive video poker machine pays.  The other row had a progressive jackpot of nearly $3,000.  The $1,200 jackpot row was full, the nearly $3,000 jackpot row was empty.

Having been a professional sports handicapper for most of my life, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  The odds of hitting a royal flush on a video poker machine is roughly 1 in 40,000 hands.  These people playing the lower payout machines had the same odds of hitting the jackpot as the higher machines, only they were accepting the same amount of risk for less than half the potential payout.  It doesn’t require knowing about concepts like ‘expected value’ to understand that they were playing the same machines, in the same part of the casino for the same stakes—and less than half of the potential winnings.

When I recount this story I’ll frequently be chided “these people were there to have a good time, and weren’t worried about the same long term money management concepts that you are.”  In some situations, I could accept this reality but not in this instance.  All these people needed to do was turn around, walk a few feet and a potential jackpot would pay twice as much.  That’s not even sound money management theory—that’s common sense.

The same concept applies to sports gambling in that players that don’t take advantage of the competitive bookmaking marketplace to secure the best odds or pointspread on a specific proposition are putting themselves at a longterm disadvantage.  At one point, being a professional sports bettor in Las Vegas required a lot of legwork going from casino to casino to shop points and find the best price.  The rise of the offshore betting industry changed that dynamic, and a player can now compare lines and odds at a variety of establishments and not leave his desk.

As the offshore sports book industry has matured, locking in the best price on a game has become even easier.  Live odds feeds, odds comparison portals and similar services enable the player to compare a wide variety of books and even place their bets from a central interface.  Many services even highlight the best prices for you, making it that much easier to get your bet down at the best price available.

With the odds comparison and live lines tools available to the modern sports gambler, there’s no longer an excuse for taking anything less than the best price available on a bet.  To willingly ‘pay’ more for a bet than necessary is simply a brain dead act of laziness.  So don’t turn off your brain when you place a bet and take advantage at all of the resources at your disposal to get the best possible price. For the professional, it’s a matter of longterm profits.  For the recreational player, it’s simply common sense.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 4:13 am and is filed under articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.