Why Sports Betting Winning Percentages aren’t that Important

The most common measure of a successful sports bettor is almost always their winning percentage. After all, wouldn’t it be obvious that a person who wins 62% of their bets versus someone who only wins 56% of the time is the better gambler? Surprisingly though, this isn’t a given at all, and the person with a lower winning percentage can actually be a much more successful sports bettor. For further evidence of this “phenomenon”, read on.

Volume of Games Bet

Most sports betting strategy pleads with gamblers to keep their wagers at a minimum. The reasoning behind this logic is simple: the more games you bet on, the less time you will have to study the contests and make informed decisions on the action. And this line of thinking is great for those who have 5 years or less of sports gambling experience under the belt, but it doesn’t hold as much weight with veterans.

Experienced sports bettors can get away with wagering on more games during the week since they know what to look for in terms of trends and statistics. With this being the case, it’s not that uncommon to see a semi-professional or professional sports bettor place wagers on 30+ games a week. Sure betting on this amount of games won’t help their winning percentage, but it gives them the ability to win far more games than other people.

Contrast this to the person who bets on 6 or 7 games a week while pouring all of their time into dissecting each one of these wagers. Sure they might be able to pull out a 60 - 65% win percentage by doing this, but they will also miss out on a lot of additional opportunities. For a further illustration of how little winning percentages can mean, let’s do a comparison of two different sports betting approaches.

Low Volume vs. High Volume

Let’s compare the aforementioned gambler who bets 30+ games a week vs. the one who only places bets on a handful of games. Assuming the first bettor tallies 133 games in a month, and has a winning percentage of 55%, they would finish with a record of 73 - 60. If the second bettor managed to place bets on 27 games during the month, while winning 63% of them, they would have an overall record of 17 – 10.

With all things being equal, including the size of bets, the person who took the high volume approach would win 6 more games during the month. And while it might take more time to place 133 bets, a total of 6 more wins is a big difference in sports betting.

Handicapping Winning Percentages

In addition to high winning percentages being artificial due to betting volume, this number can also be affected by the quality of bets won. Of course, handicapping services won’t tell you this when they advertise that their picks win over 60 percent of the time. And the sad part is that they often hook betting novices in with this number alone. However, experienced bettors know that a winning percentage doesn’t tell the whole tale in handicapping.

Sure winning over 60% of your picks is a good number, but if you are putting a lot of money on -300 favorites, this number isn’t quite so impressive. In fact, you could actually be losing money if you are only betting on heavy favorites!

Putting Winning Percentage in Perspective

The key thing to take away from all of this is that winning percentages don’t always tell the whole story in sports betting. Sure it is nice to have a high win percentage, but you have to factor in more elements in order to determine if you’re a successful bettor or not.

This means factoring in how many games you are betting in addition to also including the quality of wagers you are winning. If you truly want to get an accurate measure of your sports betting success, make sure to include win percentages, quality of bets won, and the volume of games you are betting into the equation.