Changing the Game: How to Profit From Your Passion for Sports by a Wall Street Investment Manager Paperback – November 29, 2012

The book has a lot of good advice for new bettors. It is interesting, clearly written, and edited very well. In addition to teaching the basics of sports betting (from terminology to money management), it attempts to teach a two-tiered quantitative method to handicapping. The author has a Wall Street background, and draws many parallels between sports and stock betting.There were many assumptions made that were questionable or incorrect. These assumptions include:1. The market is mostly driven by smaller, unsophisticated players. This may have been the case 20 years ago, but the syndicates and larger quant-players dominate the market now.2. Handicapping: team strength from top to bottom in all major sports remains constant from year to year (not that the same team is best, but the gap between 1st and 2d, and 2d and 3rd is the same from year to year). E.g. the best NFL team is always 26 points better than the worst. This clearly changes in all leagues from year to year.3. A 65% win rate is a reasonable goal for betting major sports. Much of the book focuses on how much money you can make by managing your money "correctly" if you hit 65% long term. There are no professional players betting spreads that hit close to that. 55% is possible, and most players do well to hit 53%.4. 5% wager size is optimal. In most cases, this is grossly overbetting. The author's advice was correct: don't overbet; but his message was garbled by the author's inflated win expectation.The author has some interesting discussion of handicapping and power rankings. If you are new to this and looking for ideas, this is a starting place (as long as you reject the premise that these approaches will hit 65%, and realize they may not even win more than 50%). I wish the author would have tracked several seasons using his various handicapping approaches (or done backtests with line movement tests). Unfortunately, the only evidence of the 65% win rate is the author's assertion that it is so.There were a number of warnings about things not to play. These include parlays, teasers, parlay cards and future wagers. Each has a place in a pro bettor's arsenal, and categorically rejecting them without further analysis is a mistake.This is a decent introductory book to thinking about handicapping, despite my criticisms. If you are already a pro bettor, you will not learn anything new (unless you have never dabbled in handicapping).

I purchased the kindle copy of this document: throughout his discussion of the method he often mentions a score sheet for the various sports, including college and pro football, college and pro basketball, and pro baseball. He states that these sheets/cards are included as a supplement in the book, and will demonstrate how the method is applied to each venue. There are issues which must be addressed when applying this method to the college game, e.g. how to evaluate and moderate the ratings of a team who has played an FCS team, or a lower tier FBS schedule prior to entering conference play. However, these exceptions are not addressed, nor are the aforementioned scoresheets, included anywhere in the book. He says they are a supplement included with the book. They are not.Moreover, his discussion of the Value Rating (Power Rating) he touts is nebulous. He does not indicate how to initialize the rating system, beyond directing the reader to various early season ratings, e.g. those by Massey (some of these ratings, where college teams are concerned, are not published until several games are played by the teams tracked). He accepts the validity of the relative strength assigned to teams by these ratings, but he does not indicate how to export them into his rating method. To elaborate: his method, "backed by extensive research" as he puts it, assumes a rating matrix with its max- and minimum values fixed year to year. He does not indicate how to map a Massey rating into this scheme, although he states that it should.On the positive side, I agree with Feustel's assessment that the ideas presented are interesting--although, without a database of data, and the computer skills to perform an evaluation of them, one can have no real confidence that the rating method works. The method needs these ratings, since they provide the means by which a bettor may set his own line, to compare with the board's offering.For the general reader, I would evaluate this book a tease.tlt-

This is a very good book for the recreational better looking to put more structure to there process. It's really all based on basic finance principles used to find value in situations where others would easily over look. I do totally agree with some of the reviews who take issue with the whole 60%+ win percentage stuff. He spends a lot of time talking about how much profit you can make as long as you manage your money and win at a minimum of 60% of the time. Pretty obvious but also damn hard to do. It also neglects the fact that you can still make plenty of money with a 45% win percentage betting on the right dogs with the right value. There are multiple references to charts etc that aren't part of the Kindle version or you have to buy one of his "Playbooks" to see, which is bit annoying. I don't know about his value rating system, I have some doubts there, but the scorecard system is similar to some of the things I do and will be using his ideas for sure. All in all though, as a numbers guy appreciate his process and plan on incorporating some of his ideas of finding value into my system.

it gives you a different way to see betting, but it was not a good choose to someone how want o learn techniques how to bet on football