Customer Reviews

Investing in College Basketball

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is pretty interesting. On the one hand it does a good job outlining the hard work necessary to win betting on college hoops, and even outlines some nice methods. But all that is almost entirely nullified by the horrendous "money management" advice Seidel gives. He sounds like a tout when he says things such as "if you can't win 60% you should be doing something else". He goes on to talk about how a 75% winning percentage seems to be attainable and gives advice for using bet sizes of over 10% of your bankroll. I can not begin to tell you how bad this advice is. It basically brings into question the rest of the book and how long Seidel has actually been involved in sports betting. His money management advice reaks of someone who had a very nice season betting basketball and doesn't have an appreciation for the swings that are inherent in betting sports. Because even the most successful sports bettor in the world would eventually go broke putting that much of his bankroll at risk. For better money management advice look into classic books such as "Insights into Sports Betting" and Beating the Professional Football Point Spread". I could only recommend this book to people who are seasoned sports bettors with their own set money management ideas and REALISTIC expectations, but are interested in reading about some good approaches to college hoops. Because there is some good advice in the book, just some very bad advice as well.

This is the single best book I have read on handicapping NCAA basketball. His methodologies for analyzing teams, and setting spreads and totals are both fascinating and deadly. This treatise has a lot of solid theoretical content which I observed in the 2004 season, and it worked in application.

This is not a gambling treatise - while his analysis of basketball is superb, his ideas on money management and risk analysis are borderline catastrophic. However, if you are already an intermediate to advanced gambler, and you ignore all the material on bet sizing, the handicapping material is first rate (and would warrant a 5-star rating).

This book is great. I love college basketball and this book describes exactly how to win by spending more time on your passion.

I love the concepts. Imagine a stock market where you know more about the stocks than anyone else. Where most of the other investors are amatuers, not professionals. Where there are few frauds like Enron, Marsh, WorldCom or HealthSouth to tank your portfolio. Where investment gains come immediately, not after years. Where there are dozens of brokers keeping commissions low.

Well, this book describes college basketball betting as just such a market. College basketball "investing" offers all of these, plus none of the disadvantages of large and public betting markets such as stock market, or even the NFL or NBA. The book is a how-to-guide for those who want to gain an advantage and have the discipline to invest the time and effort.

The book is heavy on concrete descriptions on how to gather and use information. It describes strategies for each part of the season, the advantages of specializing in a conference and how to choose one, and the key factors in game analysis. The methods seem to require a lot of work and very disciplined selections, but remember, we're talking about college basketball here. This is fun analysis.

This book is completely unlike "The Odds," which came out about three years ago. The characters in that story were gambling, something this author would probably never do. He has written a book that teaches, rather than just entertains.

Wagering on CBB for the past 5 seasons, I decided to pick up this book to see if it had anything new to offer that I had never thought of.

Turns out, almost everything I did to handicap games was in this book. So if you are just beginning to handicap CBB, this book would probably help a lot more than it did me. Either way, it was nice to see that Larry handicapped games similarly to me. Even the opinion that I have that NCAA tournament time is NOT the time to bet is held by Larry.

Something though that did open my eyes a little bit was the conference specialization. Picking a conference and only betting those games has it's advantages and disadvantages. If you don't have a lot of time though, I think it may be better to specialize in a conference than to just know some stuff about a lot of teams.

I enacted this strategy for the last month of the season last year with rather strong results to show for it.

As I mentioned, the money management section to me is poorly written. I may think this because I don't believe in what he said to do. The mantra I follow is "don't bet it unless you think you see value and thus an easy cover".

He says you should bet more on some games that show more value. Well experience shows you that some games you think have more value turn into non covers and vice versa. Betting this way is an easy way to cause a huge variance in the bottom line. I used to do that and it caused a variance of profit of over 300%.

Easy example: Over a 50 game stretch you bet between 10 and 60 dollars and finish down 100 with a .500 record. Average bet was 30 per wager. You could have bet 175 per wager and would have only been down 100 dollars as well. If you had bet the same 30 every time, you would have only been down 26 and change.

Wagering the same amount on each game keeps this variance from happening and you can worry more about hitting above 55% and not from that hole you just dug because you upped the amount on a certain game because of "perceived value".

All in all, a good book except for the money management section.

I bought this book along with author Seidel's companion book, Wagering To Win, during a dry spell in my basketball betting. These books continued the drought.

The only pearl of wisdom from this title was concentrating on a local conference, finding "live" teams or dullard squads that the bookie may have under-priced or over-priced as the circumstances dictate.

Hey guys, don't you already do that in your gambling routines? Seidel then tries to masquerade this thin exercise with a return-on-equity discourse, in an apparent attempt to convince you that you are really investing rather than betting.

The problem is: those propositions are past history. The new season brings new challenges. You cannot rely on the past to give you insights into the upcoming season.


I'll save you some bucks with this advice: bet on a roadie at your own risk. If there was ever a live proposition in gambling it has to be the homey, especially a home team dog. Home teams cover at a near-60% clip.

One of the best sources for up-to-the-minute basketball information are individual webpages from informed locals. Your problem is to find these pages, knowing that they are typically set up by fans at various campuses. None last beyond five years in duration, but I've found valuable gems of data from them. I've learned who was flunking out, rumors of team dissension, who was contemplating leaving campus for the NBA draft, what players were in the doghouse, etc. The UseNet newsgroups are the best place to start.

Sports betting is hard work. Research is vital. You won't find much of it in Seidel's book.

Take the points and skip the books on dinosaur history.

Note added August 2009: UseNet newsgroups have been obsoleted by Twitter. If NCAA football is any indication of a trend, then it appears the BB crowd has congregated at Twitter. Log in and study the tweets in college athletics; be prepared to work at winnowing the wheat from the chaff. There is solid information out fhere for those willing to work.