A lot of bettors like to use angles in their betting. An angle is simply a trend that has occurred in the past with enough frequency to be profitable that you use as a guide to find bets in the future. Angles can be found in every sport you can bet on. Some are very specific and occur only rarely, while others can occur several times each week. There is nothing wrong with betting angles, and indeed it is a great way for bettors to identify situations that could be profitable bets. Betting angles isn’t always easy, though, and there are a lot of costly mistakes you can make if you aren’t careful. Here are four big mistakes that people make when betting angles:

Blindly following something that sounds good – There are a lot of things with sports that sound like they should make sense. I’m talking about the easy assumptions that sound good and are logical on the surface. These are the kinds of things that commentators and analysts always like to talk and write about. There is only one problem with these kinds of things – they often aren’t true. They might sound good, and they might hold up under light analysis, but when you look at them more closely and scrutinize them then you’ll find that they aren’t true often enough to be profitable. Sometimes you’ll even find that the opposite is actually true. You can’t just trust anything you see or hear without first making sure that it actually does make sense and prove to be true – it’s your money that is going to be on the line, so this only makes sense. This is especially true when you read about an angle on the Internet. Everyone online seems to have an angle or two that they want to tell you about, and most will claim that it is a great angle that will make you rich. The large majority of them, though, just don’t hold up. Sometimes they just aren’t profitable, and other times they used to be profitable but aren’t anymore. Before you follow any angle that anyone tells you about you need to check their logic and their testing to make sure that it really is as good as it sounds. There is one thought you can use as a guide – if the angle was so great then why would they be giving it away to strangers on the Internet?

Testing over a small sample size – Testing angles to make sure that they actually pick winners and can be profitable is the most important step to betting angles. If you don’t test comprehensively enough, though, then you can convince yourself that an angle is valuable before it really is. If, for example, you just test an angle over a sample size of ten games then you can have no confidence at all that just because you would have won seven of those 10 games you will win seven of every ten games. If you tested it over a much larger sample size of 10000 games, though, then you could be far more confident that if 7000 games had been winners you would win seventy percent of games going forward. The bigger the sample size you use the more confidence you can have going forward.

Relying too heavily on your angle – Successful bettors use angles as a guide – a map towards sports picks that might be interesting. They don’t use them as ironclad rules that pick games that they absolutely have to bet on. If you want to bet angles then once you have identified a game that could be attractive you need to evaluate if there are other circumstances that could make the game less attractive. Some examples could include serious injuries to a star, extreme weather that will impact how teams will play the game, heavily lopsided betting interest on the game, and so on. In those cases the right thing could be skip the game – even if the angle says it is a good one. You are smarter than your betting angles so you need to control them and not let them control you. If you can consistently eliminate games that are likely to be losers then your win percentage will be better and your bankroll will grow faster.

Not adjusting over time – Most angles that are winners now will not be winners forever. There are a few reasons for that. For one, if angle becomes popular and is used by a lot of bettors then sportsbooks will adjust their lines to compensate for that angle and make it less profitable. More significantly, as time passes sports change. Guys become stronger and faster, coaches become more sophisticated and have more technology to use, and strategies and schemes evolve in response to what is happening. The pressure for teams to win is more intense every year, so the efforts teams use to find wins becomes more intense as well. If you just keep betting the same angles year after year then you are going to find your profits decreasing. Eventually your bankroll will start to shrink. If you are betting angles then the worst thing you can be is complacent.