Beat the Sports Book: An Insider's Guide to Betting the NFL

by Dan Gordon

Book Overview

Dan Gordon, who is widely regarded as one of the three best football handicappers in the world, shares his inside tips and strategies on making big money betting on NFL football. Much of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1580421741
• ISBN13: 9781580421744
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Cardoza Publishing
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Puts Miller's Book to Shame

Easily one of the BEST books I've read on sports handicapping. Dan Gordon is a legitimate pro gambler (unlike JR Miller author of "How pro gamblers beat the football point spread") who understands how to win. The part of the book called the "pro bettors toolkit" provide the reader with genuinely good advice which if followed properly should lead to more winners than losers. I wish he went into detail on how he makes a Letter Rating but that is just something that I am going to have to come up with on my own. For handicapping the NFL this is the only book you'll need but for other useful information I would suggest Donny P's book "win more lose less" and Stanford Wong's "Sharp Sports Betting". I definitely believe this book will help increase my ROI this coming NFL season.

a master handicapper explains his craft

Dan Gordon's updated NFL handicapping book is the kind of book one doesn't so much read as study. Handicapping the NFL over a period of many years is hard work, serious work, and Gordon takes it very seriously. Properly done, it ends up amounting to a part-time job. We are not talking about making easy money betting on football. The first point, which might be obvious to bettors but bears repeating, is that football odds as set by oddsmakers are not meant to predict the actual outcome of the game - they are meant to attract equal distributions of money bet on each side, and this is not the same thing. They have their customers, the casinos, offshore and (illegal) local books to think of. You are not their customer. There are thus opportunities for discrepancies to exist which the bettor will be able to exploit for profit. Gordon reviews how oddsmakers come up with the line, the various regular and more exotic bets available (on which he spends very little time until the very end of the season), and the odds both mathematical and psychological/social working against the would-be winning bettor. This is all very clearly explained and well written. Further, he assesses various information sources that amateur bettors use, usually to their financial loss, such as much major media, touts, some sports services and professional commentators, all of which generally talk a good game but when their win/loss records are finally revealed are shown to be highly problematic. Worse, they tend to judge themselves against a 50% win/loss barometer, when of course the winning bettor must clear 53% just to stay even. Further, not only knowledge and applied research, but also timing of bets proves to be highly important. Gordon is honest enough to show numerous cases where he had early access to better prices or numbers, or where these evaporated so quickly, he could not recommend a game to his service customers as that line no longer existed. In game after game one sees how a point or 1 1/2 point difference in the spread means the difference between a winning and losing bet. The NFL teams are very very close in quality overall. Personal discipline in passing on games where the number is close but not quite good enough to bet is important to long term success as well. In the heart of the book, Gordon's handicapping system, he examines not only hard statistics, but leans heavily towards psychological motivations and factors. There is no factor one can think of to which he does not assign some value, a half point here and a half point there. He explains his starting points for the season using both letter and numerical power ratings, and how he updates each team after each game, every step of the way. The book holds seemingly nothing back. The last half of the book follows first the Bills through the entire 2002 season, applying the factors of his system to every game they would play, whether he bet on it (and why) or not (and why not). Then he fo

Great book, very in depth

This book tells you how to handicap NFL games. In order to properly handicap games, you have to do a lot of research and work. This book tells you how to do that. This book is for anyone, beginner or expert, who wants to put in the time to research and study NFL games. If you don't want to spend a lot of time, don't buy this book. However if you are interested in really learning to handicap, this book is very detailed and thorough.

How to Handicap NFL Games

Whether this book would be helpful to you, the potential NFL bettor, depends largely on what kind of information you are looking for. Beat the Sports Books is primarily devoted to teaching the reader how to handicap his/her own NFL games -specifically, how to make your own lines. The author, Dan Gordon, has over 20 years of experience handicapping and betting on NFL games and gives the reader the benefit of this experience. He explains, in considerable detail and with many examples, how to calculate your own lines and power rankings and how to determine which bets are worth making. This is an in-depth course in line-making and takes concentration and persistence to fully absorb. The author also devotes one chapter to pointers for betting at different stages in the NFL season, which is simpler and might be worth considering even if you don't intend to make your own lines. 62 of the book's 165 pages are appendices. Appendix 1 follows one NFL team through an entire season in order to illustrate the finer points of calculating a team's power ranking over the course of a season. The second Appendix contains a full season (1996) of bets that the author made with explanations of why he made each bet. Included are some bets that he didn't make and reasons that he passed on those. The appendices could prove to be invaluable references if you intend to get serious about NFL betting, especially betting over the long haul.There is some information in this book that is not about handicapping. The title of the book's first chapter is: "How Pro Football Is Bet and How the Point Spread is Set". It includes explanations of different kinds of bets (spreads, over-under, parlays, parlay cards, reverses, teasers) and explanations, with examples, of how the Las Vegas Sports Consultants set their lines each week. In chapter 2, the author goes on to explain how the media can affect betting, how touts work... These chapters contain a lot of interesting information that would be useful to both serious and casual NFL bettors.Beat the Sports Books is really dedicated to teaching you how to determine what bets to make. There isn't much advice on precisely how to place those bets beyond the author's emphasis on trying the get the early lines and shopping for a fair price on your bet. There are no lists of sports books or internet casinos or instructions in how exactly to communicate what you would like to bet once you've found one. The information in Beat the Sports Books would seem to be intended for the relatively experienced bettor.I'll risk repeating myself here, just to be clear: Beat the Sports Books is a lesson in handicapping NFL games with an overwhelming emphasis on making your own lines. Dan Gordon provides the reader with detailed instruction in the methods that he uses to calculate lines, based on over 20 years of experience as an NFL bettor. There is relatively little advice on other methods of handicapping. If you would like to be able to calculate your own