Handicapping Games – Intangibles

Whether you are picking stocks or handicapping games there are two elements that mainly come into play, information and intangibles.  If the Internet age you have access to every imaginable statistic, you want on a player or a team with a few clicks of your mouse.   Not just you have access to this, everyone has access information and most importantly, the bookmakers have access to this.

A point to remember is when you see a line it is only partly based on the likelihood of one team beating the other, the other part of the line is based on the public’s perception of which team will beat the other team. If the original line maker determines the Patriots will beat the Bengals by 4 points but they know the public believes the Patriots will beat the Bengals by 7 points, the bookmaker will set the line at 6.5 points. They do this so that the public will still place all their bets on the Patriots at 6.5 and trust that the Patriots only win the game by 4 points as they originally predicted. This is where sportsbooks make their money, not by the juice taken on losing bets but on the public consistently picking the wrong team winning by the wrong score.

I bring that up because after you use the stats that everyone has access to, the advantage that you can take over the general public is knowing the intangibles, not just knowing the stats but understanding how the sports “works” and the differences that make the difference.  Some people will handicap a game solely on stats and then mix in injuries and weather to determine the most likely outcome but if you can understand little things like the importance of a game for one of the teams. Is a particular player on a team out performing his seasonal average? Did one of the player’s parents die; remember Brett Favre’s Monday Night Football game against the Raiders? It’s a little callous but these little things factor into a player performance and its information you can’t read in the stat sheet. Last Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors started the season in MVP form but in November, his play stunk and the Raptors suffered for it. Around Toronto there were rumors that were later confirmed that he was going through a messy breakup with his longtime girlfriend and to compound the problem, his girlfriend was pregnant and about to give birth a couple of months later. If you are serious about finding these intangibles look at the local papers for each teams, read internet message boards and remember if there’s smoke, there’s fire. It may be a rumor but if you see a player, underperforming you can guess there is some truth to it.