System Players Can't Be Choosy
Throughout the years sports bettors who follow systems have gotten a bit of a bad rap. The premise is that no system can consistently beat the bookie. To that extent, the naysayers are correct in that no one system will beat the house.But those armed with a number of systems that make sense form a logical standpoint and have proven to be successful over time have a solid chance of being succesful. The key is that the system has to make sense, which is one reason I try to explain the rationale behind each system that we give.
If you were to look at historical records, I'm sure you could find a season in which the team who had the player with the longest name covered the spread at a solid rate. But there's no logic in that, so don't overlook that aspect.
The advantage to being a system player is that it should take all of the guesswork and emitional aspects of sports betting away, but it doesn't always work out that way. Many sports bettors, and I'll admit to doing this myself on occasion, make the mistake of picking and choosing a system's plays. It's not our job to do that. It's our job to follow our systems.
Using myself as an example, we only have to go back to Wednesday, June 15. After following the reverse line movements there were two teams who came up as plays. The Tampa Bay Rays and the Washington Nationals.
Tampa looked to be a solid wager at +120 against the Red Sox, but how could I possibly take Washington -105 against the St. Louis Cardinals? You can already guess what happened, as Tampa was stymied by Josh Beckett, only managing to get one base hit, while the Nats rolled to a 10-0 victory.
That brings me to the point of this article and it's to reiterate if you follow systems don't pick and choose which games to follow, play them all. If you pick and choose your games, you'll invariably end up passing on those games which look too bad to bet and as you know, are generally the games that we end up winning.
I'll be the first to admit that there are definitely teams that look so bad, either on the money line or with the point spread, that it takes a lot of nerve to pull the trigger on, but those tend to be the tickets we cash more often than not.
