I've seen a couple of heavily advertised handicappers post pretty impressive records for the 2008 season.  Even if their records are accurate, none of them generated as high of a return on the initial investment IF THEY WERE FOLLOWING PROPER BANKROLL MANAGEMENT, which typically involves any individual wager being between 1-2% of the current bankroll.  So while they sported an impressive Win/Loss ratio, the total return on investment, if they were at the high end at 2% per wager, would have left them still a little shy of a 100% return on their bankroll investment.  My record last year involved a near 129% return on the initial bankroll investment while risking slightly less than 1% of the intial bankroll per play.  So we're talking about a substantially higher return on the inital bankroll investment with a substantially smaller amount risked per play than the other guys.  Now, I'm not out there scouting out every other handicapper on the market, but I'm pretty certain I had the best season of any NFL handicapper on the market.  Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.  Granted, to have that kind of success as a subscriber of mine requires more work than being a subscriber of an average handicapper, as there are a lot more plays involved.  But if it's money you're after...

The “paper and pencil and the sports section of the USA today” handicapping that I started with almost 20 years ago has evolved to the current Excel spreadsheet based NFL handicapping beast designed to wring every last drop of value out of the NFL lines. It’s big, it’s impressive, trust me. A slew of proprietary formulas and rescoring methods have enabled me to generate my own spreads and totals that have consistently beat the Vegas lines over the last 5+ years. I’ve not once had a losing season in all of my years of public posting.

 For many years I shared online the professional method for beating sports betting:

  Make A LOT of bets involving wagers that rate to show even a small amount of positive expected value. With my track record of being up hundreds of wagers over thousands of bets, it’s safe to say that my recommended plays will have a positive expectation the majority of the time.

1. Risk no more than 1%-2% of your bankroll on any given play. Remember, it’s better to win 250 bets at a 55% win rate than 50 bets at a 60% win rate. Not only that, the more total wagers you make that have a positive expectation, the more stable your outcome will be over time. Following all of my recommended plays will put anywhere from 25% to 100% of your bankroll into action during the course of any given week in the NFL. Because a typical week involves anywhere from 30 up to 80 plays, I’m able to utilize an even more conservative amount per recommended wager: 1 Unit = 1% of bankroll, with many smaller wagers and the occasional larger wager. So even though you’ll end up putting 50% or more of your bankroll on the line on any given week, it will be conservatively spread among many, many plays, reducing the risk of being a net loser on any given week. I end up with so many plays because in addition to your simple spreads and totals I also make recommended plays on: teasers - when the lines are in profitable zones for 2-team plays (and much less frequently a 10 or 13 point sweetheart play), team total plays – when I see line value coinciding with a team total being on the right side of a key scoring number, 2^nd half plays – I’ve crafted a system over the years that has resulted in 2^nd half plays being one of my most profitable categories, proposition bets – Monday and Thursday night games come with a bevy of proposition bets from some online books – I started handicapping these intensely last season for the first time with very positive results, the occasional parlay when I feel there’s a correlation and the book actually allows you to still make the play (they won’t always), and the occasional middle try when the line has moved past my projected line (for example: I recommend taking the Over 43 on an opening line for a game where my line is 45 and the line closes at 46).
2. Attack the opening lines before the sharps bet them into shape. As a result of crafting a complex line making spreadsheet, I know which way the lines are going to move 80-90% of the time. What I do and what the big computer groups and betting syndicates do to establish our lines are similar in many ways – they must be, because we’re all in there fighting over the same opening lines getting the best value/lines on our early wagers. I’ve tracked publicly for a few years now the results of my recommended wagers versus the subsequent line moves and I come out well more than a hundred points ahead every year when the dust settles and the lines become stale later in the week. This means you’re getting a vig refund on many, many of your plays before the games even start, allowing you to scalp, middle or sit happily on the great line you got – a luxury that gives you many winners over the course of a season that were losers for everyone else that got on board too late.
3. Track injuries – and accurately gauge how much it affects the team. I have a very detailed roster system I implemented last season. I track which players start (and I look at the game statistics to find players who logged a lot of stats and were, essentially, starters, even though not officially listed as such in the box score data). I then use correlations between the games a player starts and how his offense or defense performed versus the opponent’s averages to get an idea of how important a player is. Then, a team’s offensive/defensive pass/rush statistics are slightly adjusted based on the values of the projected starters for the week. The long and short of it is, unless we’re talking about a star quarterback, you may find some surprising results about how replaceable a player really is with the 2^nd stringer waiting behind him. Multiple injuries to players in the same unit (i.e. the offensive line) typically results in a negative compounding factor that will also go into my offensive and defensive projections.
4. Line shopping – the offshore books tend to chase each other’s tails when lines start moving, meaning you can get away with having just a handful of outs and not miss much unless you’re worried about the sheer volume of $$$ you’re looking to get down on any given game. With my conservative but profitable style, it’s never been an issue for me, anyway, lol. You do need a good sized chunk of your bankroll (50% range) in a book (or books) that offers the opening lines. For those in the good ol’ USA, that means Bookmaker.com. Of those books that offer up lines shortly after the brunt takers, I recommend 5Dimes.com. They are my preferred out for team total plays and proposition bets, as they typically offer standard juice on those plays, unlike BookMaker. I’ve cajoled Matchbook.com, a bet-matching site, over the years about their unwillingness to open the NFL markets until Monday night or later and they responded last year (only in small part thanks to me, I reckon, lol), by opening their markets earlier, though they’re still not available to use for opening line wagering. During the course of the week, however, you will almost always get a better price on your wager with them because of the reduced juice available there. You can often get a better price on the juice for 2^nd half plays there as well, though once again you have to wait a little longer for the markets to start filling up. Speed in getting your wagers placed before lines move (for opening lines and second half lines) is of such importance that for a solo bettor with a modest bankroll you may be better off having the bulk of your bankroll with just a few outs. I recommend going with 50% at Bookmaker, 30% at 5Dimes, and 20% at Matchbook. The goal is to have about equal amounts left in your accounts for 2^nd half wagering. I've now added TheGreek and BetPhoenix as outs.
5. Single-sport dedication. I’m not saying I’ll never add another sport to my handicapping repertoire, but given the huge amount of hard work it takes to set up a sport and maintain/handicap it, it won’t be happening any time soon. That means during the NFL season I put in full time hours handicapping only one sport. Without going into too much personal detail, I work at home while my wife has a 9-5. We have one less than school-aged child who I take care of at home. What that means is that I’m rarely far from my computer for extended periods of time during the football season. I try my hardest to stay on top of line moves, injury updates, and general news so that I can alert my subscribers to new plays and opportunities. I work extremely hard so that you don’t have to. Which isn’t to say that you won’t have to work. Au contraire, to maximize your profit, you will also have to be there in the trenches when opening lines come Sunday evening and during halftimes scrapping for the best lines. You can’t expect to make sharp money without doing what sharps do when it comes to opening lines. Expect your Sundays to be very busy if you want them to be very profitable. Most of the other days you can leave the grunt work to me, though Monday and Thursday night games are a lot of fun by the time we get all of our prop plays on board.

Remember, I've been a successful NFL handicapper for a lot longer than I've been a pay service.  My dues have been paid and documented.  My handicapping simply reached a point where it was in my best interest to get something back for the several years of hard work I'd been putting into it and sharing free of charge.  I was confident that it would still be profitable for people to follow my plays even with the additional "vig" that paying for my service entailed.  Last year's results, my first year as a pay service, more than validated the worth of paying for my service, as even the smallest of wagerers could've turned a tidy profit.