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Sharp Sports Betting by Stanford Wong is a book that aims to provide sports betting advice to new and experienced bettors. Most of the topics, however, are for the beginning bettor.
In Sharp Sports Betting, Wong does a good job of explaining the basics of betting to the reader. Next Wong moves on to explain handicapping to the reader. Wong discusses aspects of handicapping such as injuries and motivational factors, but he refers the reader to a website to use for mathematical predictions. Something more than providing the user with a website might have been better here.
Sharp Sports Betting isn't without its gems. The chapters on testing win-loss records for significance and using a Poisson distribution to model the probabilities of exotic propositions provide the reader with solid advice.
The chapter on testing win-loss records for significance helps the reader understand why a "trend" against the spread or OVER/UNDER is likely to happen due to chance alone. Most of these "trends" are not significant and will happen due to chance alone.
The chapter detailing how to calculate the probability of an event that is modeled using a Poisson distribution can provide the reader with a unique way of handicapping exotic bets for events such as the Super Bowl.
Overall Sharp Sports Betting is a book the sports handicapper should have on his bookshelf. Those readers new to handicapping/betting sports are the best fit for Sharp Sports Betting.
I give this book a four out of five on the Benjamin scale.
- Ryan J. Parker | Ryan's sports handicapping blog
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