There’s several factors that make a particular sport the ‘best’ to bet on. It ultimately depends on your personal outlook.
This article extends the answer I provided to the Trademate Sports ‘Industry Experts’ blog for the question: What’s the best sport to bet on?
Choosing A Sport For Betting
As a bettor you’ll choose to focus on specific sports for one or more reasons, such as:
- Value: if your main objective is to generate a profit, then some sports will present more opportunities than others.
- Sporting interest: if you’re invested in the sport itself (e.g. you regularly watch it on TV, follow a particular club or individual), then you might prefer to bet on those events — especially if you feel that you have an advantage.
- Frequency of events: some sports have more events than others. This might dictate what you decide to focus your betting activity on.
- Betting enjoyment: some events have more markets, more variety, and various other elements (e.g. high odds long shots) that add to your excitement of sports betting. Whether you realise it or not, this might influence your choices.
The real question is: what are you looking to achieve from sports betting?
Horse Racing: My Chosen Sport
Theoretically, given that earning a profit is my main priority, I’d say horse racing is the best sport to bet on.
Ironically I don’t take a huge interest in horse racing itself. In fact, I’ve only ever been to a handful of race days. I’m far more interested in football, and I’ll watch it religiously every week during the Premier League season.
But I recognise that from an investment standpoint horse racing offers several advantages over most other sports.
Advantages Of Horse Racing
- The odds move so drastically that you can secure a price that’s far better than the current market odds (or closing line). See my Guide To Beating the Closing Line.
- ‘Best Odds Guaranteed‘ is offered by many bookmakers, providing protection against price moves out of your favour.
- Events come in thick & fast (all year round), so there’s always more opportunities on the horizon.
- Money can be recycled rapidly, as there’s (usually) only a matter of hours from bet placement to bet settlement.
- Arbitrage and value bets very frequently arise in horse racing markets.
But note that I said ‘theoretically‘ horse racing is the best sport. Allow me to elaborate…
The Reality Of Profitable Sports Betting
The fact is, bookmakers closely monitor the horse racing markets (and any other profitable sport) for the very reasons I’ve stated above. So while it may have all the elements that a professional bettor wants, it’s often a better proposition to focus on a combination of less-popular betting markets.
Obscure markets in football, basketball, hockey, tennis — among many others — spring to mind. While the ROI of opportunities found in these markets will almost certainly be lower than in horse racing, part of betting professionally is working out when you’re most likely to get your accounts limited, and steering clear of those situations.
You can find obscure value bets by using a value bet finder, like Trademate.
Full Review: Best Value Bet Finder
Limitations Of Less-Popular Sports
Just keep in mind that choosing extremely obscure markets creates problems of its own.
Liquidity is often low — meaning you’ll struggle to get big stakes away. Plus, let’s face it: you’ll raise a few eyebrows at the bookies for being so confident on ludicrously niche events!
With this in mind, the ‘best’ sport from a professional standpoint is simply whatever enables you to generate the most expected value.
- Is it blasting your stakes on high yield events and most probably facing the ‘chop’ in record time?
- Is it betting on less obvious sports with a lower ROI, but lasting a little longer before restriction?
- Or is there another approach that enables you to fly under the radar for longer?
If you can find a way to consistently profit from the betting exchange then this entire conversation changes.
But until then you’ll have to experiment in your approach to betting on value. I can’t give a definitive solution to avoiding account restrictions because not all bookies take the same approach to identifying pros, and there’s no guarantee any successful method will continue to work in the future.
- May 2023|Top Football Tipsters Of The Month - June 6, 2023
- May 2023 | Top Horse Racing Tipsters Of The Month - June 5, 2023
- The Roulette Kaleidoscope: The Game’s Mysteries & Intricacies - May 22, 2023
Is there any software to find value bets on us horse races?
Not that I know of, unfortunately. I do want to learn more about what opportunities are available for US sports bettors in general. So perhaps I’ll work on that over the coming year.