The Home and Away Factor

For today's post I would like to bring up a point that has been seriously overlooked by most when it comes to the point spread system, or the Asian handicap system as football (soccer)punters know it. If there is one advice which I can give you off the top of my head, it is common sense does prevail in sports betting.

If you have the right resources, try conducting a correlation test on the intensity of crowd support to a team's home and away form. In case you haven't noticed, how near a crowd sits and how fierce the support for either team is for a particular game all contribute to the home and away form of the various sports teams. Therefore, for sports like basketball and football (or soccer), with the crowd being so near the players, the home team with passionate supporters will enjoy the familiar "home ground advantage".

I am going to take professional European football as an example here. If you look at the Italian leagues, where some stadiums fence their fans away from the action, and also due to how big some of those stadiums are (some supporters stand can be really far away from the action), the ratio of the home teams winning are a lot lower than the English league, where the fans sit within close proximity of the players.

Note that there are also instances where intense home support can actually be counter productive of a team's progress on the field. Newcastle United, for example, has one of the fiercest and most loyal group of supporters in the world of football. Their passionate fans hate to lose and as a result, end up expecting too much from their team, directly creating a lot of pressure for the players.

This scenario is the most clearly reflected if the team is either A) a team made up of a couple of new players B) having new players who are from different places with a vastly different sporting culture.

I've actually taken Newcastle as a case study earlier in the season and done a couple of tests with the examination of the team performance and comparing that to the volume of crowd noise, and it's no surprise that the team tends to make mistakes and concede some really soft goals when the crowd starts to voice out their displeasure over a 5 to 10 minutes period.

My point here is simple, sometimes when the concept of winning and losing gets too deep into your head, you tend not to make judgements based on logic and common sense. Besides encouraging you to build up the discipline for a clear mind, I seriously urge you to constantly step back and analyze your betting decisions rationally before putting your money on it.

If you still remember the first 5 to 10 bets you made in your life, you'll realize that the winning percentage of those games was actually higher than what you are achieving now, and all that was accomplished simply with the clarity of mind and some simple common sense. Remember that sometimes you do need to go back to be able to go forward!