One thing that being laid up gives you is time. Before I had my knees shattered by a diving tackle from a player that Ican only assume was some sort of evil scientist’s experiment in cloning some hideous ape-rhinoceros mutant hybrid, I was not exactly studious. In fact, I often thought that I’d rather have my eyes gouged out by a pair of filthy vultures than read another page of schoolbooks.

However, when the research involved sports and money, I turned out to be a surprisingly good student. And when I really had no choice because I was pretty much all alone and stuck in bed for months on end, combing the Internet for sports betting strategies suddenly seemed like a pretty good option.

The first thing that I found and committed to memory was the concept of “expected return”. You may have heard of it, but what it basically means is how often you can expect to win a bet (versus the “odds”, which aren’t really based on anything besides how much the bookie wants to make off of you).

There are some pretty complicated formulas for figuring out expected return, because it’s different for every type of bet. In fact, you can find an expected return for just about anything in gambling, from individual online slots to all of those little individual craps bets at online casino USA. So if you’re interested in using expected return, I can assure you that there is someone out there who has done the math for you already.

Oh, one other thing that took me a long time to really agree with: the gambler’s fallacy. You can lose a lot of money betting on tails because the last throw was heads (and vice versa, of course). Of course, sports betting isn’t like dice or roulette, and plenty of external and unique factors have an affect on whether the game is won or lost. But the “law of averages” or “I’m due for a win” or anything like that is never going to work for you.