Sports betting systems don’t work. That is to say, sports betting systems that are openly for sale on the internet won’t work in the long term. The problem is that if a system is successful, it will attract a lot of users. When too many people start using a system, the sportsbooks adjust their lines to compensate for the predictive effect of the system rendering it useless. For example, if a system recommends betting on the Celtics -9 over the Knicks, the line will quickly move to Celtics -10 as the users of the system start piling on their wagers, rendering the initial pick obsolete. This may be extremely obvious to some people, but based on the number of sports betting systems I see advertised regularly, it seems that the message hasn’t gotten out to everyone quite yet.

This is not to say that sports betting systems can never work. The fun part about sports betting is that, unlike casino gambling, there is no deterministic advantage for the house. Like the stock market, in sports betting smart money takes dumb money. The issue is that if you did have a successful sports betting system, you would really have very little incentive to share it with anyone else. A person could make more money off of the successful sports picks generated by their system than they would selling those picks and, eventually, killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Again, I know this seems painfully obvious to many, but it’s news to some and a message worth repeating.

This idea was nicely summed up on a recent thread over at Black Hat SEO:

Bookies change the odds (or point spread) based on the amount bet. If your system works and you sell it, and people make money on it regularly, they will bet more and more until you start shifting the odds and it will no longer work. If it really works you are much better off if you keep it a secret and use it to bet yourself.

The following video from our youtube friend parlayhelp does a great job of explaining the games played by purveyors of sports betting systems and why the potential buyer should beware: