How Stats Can Give Sports Bettors an Advantage

Chicago is a hotbed of sporting activity, with many top sports teams calling the Windy City home. It’s one of only 11 cities in the US to have teams representing America’s five major professional team sports: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer. In early 2020, people in Chicago gained a new way to interact with sports: placing bets on them.

The state of Illinois formally legalized sports betting back in 2019, with the act of placing real-money bets on sports first taking place in March 2020. If this is something you’re keen on doing, the first step is to choose a legit betting site that is safe, secure, and trustworthy. There are plenty of options, and the number of online sportsbooks you can join is steadily growing. Finding a betting site is one thing, working out how to gain an advantage with your sports bets is another. This is where stats step in.

What Are Sports Betting Stats?

Stats are simply the facts and figures from previous games, matches, competitions, and tournaments. There are stats for both whole teams and individual players. At pretty much any sports betting site, you can find stats that go back months or even years. They should cover all of the sport’s recent events, from international, top-level ones right down to smaller, more localized ones.

At all the best online sportsbooks, stats are updated in real time. If an event has just finished, you should be able to log in to your sportsbook account and find the stats for it. The more facts, figures, and pieces of information a betting site has to offer, the better.

How Sports Betting Stats Can Give You a Betting Advantage

When placing a bet on any sport, you don’t need to consult any relevant stats. However, this is strongly recommended because when you look at stats, you gain knowledge. This knowledge can help you make better betting decisions and possibly even lose less money over the long term. When it comes to sports betting, there’s nothing that can guarantee you’ll make a profit. Stats, however, can still be helpful.

The idea is simple. If you don’t know anything about how a team/individual has performed recently, you might as well just place a bet at random and hope for the best. On the other hand, knowledge about recent performance can help you greatly. Looking at stats is a way of discovering which teams and individuals have done well. You can also tell whether there’s been an improvement or if the performance hasn’t been up to standard.

Let’s say you’re a fan of a particular team. We’ll use the Chicago Bears as an example. You want to place a bet on their next match, but decide to check out their stats first. If they’ve won a lot of their recent matches and have been scoring plenty of points, they should be a relatively safe bet. However, if they’ve been losing most of their matches and haven’t scored many points at all, this underperformance streak might not end anytime soon. In other words, it might not be worth betting on a team when they haven’t been performing their best recently.

Stats can also be a great help when you’re betting on a team. Each individual player who’s a part of the team has their own stats. If all the players look good on paper, the team as a whole should, in theory, perform to a high standard. However, if there’s a large number of players who don’t have good stats from recent events, this could affect the team’s performance.

It’s worth pointing out that stats are important, but they don’t always indicate exactly what’s going to happen. If a team has good stats from recent games, there’s every chance they’ll perform poorly in the match you’re betting on. The opposite can also happen. The point is that in any sport, there’s no foolproof way of telling who will win. Underdogs can rise to the top, and favorites can fail to meet expectations. Stats can help give you an idea, but they can only go so far.

The Importance of Sports News

As well as checking the facts and figures of previous events, it helps to stay up to date with the latest sports goings-on. Knowing how a team has performed is one thing; being aware of line-up changes and their impact on the team’s results is another.

Following sports news can give you an advantage. When you know what’s happened recently, you can make informed betting decisions. It’s always best to be informed when betting on sports simply because anything that’s happened can affect what takes place on the day. For example, if someone gets injured and has to be replaced at the last minute, this can have a noticeable effect on the team’s performance.

Take Your Sports Betting to the Next Level

The next time you bet on sports, especially if you’re backing one of Chicago’s many top teams, don’t just place a bet without doing any research. Spend a short amount of time reading stats. This may influence your betting decision and could even result in you placing bets that are more likely to win.

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