How To Make A Sports Betting Spreadsheet
One of the most common questions we get at Clear Data Sports is: 'How can I build a sports betting model using analytics?' It's a great question, and there i. We have great sports betting tools and tips for up. When betting on sports, it is important to have the right tools and tips. Our sports betting tools and tips include spreadsheets to assist you with your sports betting. The Bet Tracker and the Arbitrage Calculator are available in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Wow, it's interesting that sports handicapping involves no just betting on the different odds that a team is going to prevail over the other in any upcoming match, it also involves a lot of data that has to be gathered over a long period of time in order to be able to properly 'perceive' the chances of this team winning against another in a heated match. Sports betting analytics. Sports betting model is a method, that helps you to project your own (winning percentages) odds before you bet, by using sports betting analytics. It is a very important part of the betting system that helps you finding a team’s probabilities more accurately than a bookmaker/betting market. It helps you to find the value that most other bettors wouldn’t find. How To Build A Predictive Betting Model. Building a sports betting model can be difficult work. We won't lie to you. It can mean long hours of tediously entering data, sorting spreadsheets, setting up databases, testing, re-testing and re-re-testing.
The goal of every sports bettor is a profit and success and every time when it comes to profit we must track our performance. It is fundamental aspect of successful sports betting and it is nice to see more and more sports bettors keep tracking their bets. It is very important to keep accurate and honest records for your betting activities.
Many sports handicappers use betting spreadsheets to track betting records, but not many track their performance properly. I saw many blog posts, downloadable bet spreadsheets, videos and even many bettors records on the internet, but most of them don’t track all the statistics that is needed to make a better picture about betting record. This is why I will point out important statistics that everyone must start tracking and will help you better to understand your betting activities.
Why keeping your sports betting records is important?
Anyone who is serious about making money in sports betting, will need to see at some point if sports betting activities brings him profit or just joy with his friends. Don’t get me wrong, betting with friends can be fun, but if we focus on profitable betting, every professional sports will tell you how important is to invest time to track and analyse betting records.
Only if you keep tracking your bets, you will see how much money you make, how much you have invested and what is maybe even more important – in which direction your sports betting investment is going. One of the scariest things in sports betting is creating an illusion after couple of bets that someone is a winning bettor, but in fact he just win because of luck.
How to start tracking your bets?
Once you decide to bet more seriously, the first thing is to learn and understand sports betting and betting market. The next thing is to establish a sports betting bankroll and lock it for longer period of time. This is the money that will work for you. If you will not have the edge and if you will lose in betting, you will be out of the game. And tracking your bets will give you the answer on this.
There are 3 important steps how to start keeping your sports betting records:
- Learn how to read betting results in a bet tracker. A lot of sports bettors track their bets, but they have no idea how to read their records. Yield/ROI of +30% on 50 bets will not tell us anything, but many will create an illusion that they are the best sports handicappers in the world.
- Bet Tracking Spreadsheet / Tool / Software. After you understand what will you track and what every bet tracking statistics tell you about your record, you can either create your own bet tracking spreadsheet or you can find some other tool or software that will track your bets. I recommend betting spreadsheet in excel or in google spreadsheets, because it is easy to use, anyone can learn how to create it or use it. Once you learn how to use it, you can later add extra information and statistics that you need. There are some services, tool and software that will track betting records, but most of them miss one or more important betting statistics.
- Take time and track your bets accurately and honestly. Once you understand what are you tracking and once you have your betting spreadsheet, simply take some time every day and put all your bets in betting spreadsheet. Usually it is just couple of minutes, sometimes seconds, but the reward of understanding your betting is huge.
Poor Sports Betting Record Keeping
Before we dive into 5 important statistics, that most bettors don’t track let’s check some of the very bad examples of bet tracking records that we can see on the internet. Remember that poor bet tracking record not only that it will not help you, it can be bad, because either you create wrong illusion about your betting skill, or you follow sports handicappers that have no edge.
This picture above is very bad example of how not to show or track your bets.
- W-L (Win%) Record is not enough! Here we can see this example. First of all 12-2 is very small sample size of bets. Secondly if we check other numbers, we can see 86-65, 74-58,…. This will not tell us anything. First of all we don’t know what are his units played on these games. Professional sports bettors bet different units on different games depends on the value they get. 86-65 can be a losing record if he played 65 games (that he lost) for 10 units and 86 games (that he won) for 1 unit. If he can not provide this information about his units, we can just guess. Secondly, we also don’t know what is average odds. 86-65 record is a negative record (-2.8 units if he played 1 unit/bet) if his odds were -143 (1.70). And of course I will not even start talking about profit, because profit can vary in this type of bet records. Because we don’t have all information, we can just guess. You will see many sports handicappers showing their betting records in W-L format, but this is not enough if you don’t have more information.
- Win%, ROI is not enough. Example: Win% = 70%, ROI = +25%. Another poor example is Win% and ROI. Many bettors added ROI/Yield to their sports betting tracker, but this is again – not enough. ROI (Yied) is heavily dependent on the number of bets. Yield (ROI) of 5% on 1000 bets is much stronger than ROI (Yield) of 30% on 10 bets. Sample size matters and if you don’t have the number of bets, win% and ROI (Yield) is completely useless information.
- W-L Record based on last X games. such records are taken out of the context and you can always take the record and manipulate it as you wish. Just take sample size that you need and ignore the sample size you don’t want to show. Two things are important here. If you keep betting records for yourself, be honest with yourself. Don’t be blind on big sample size. Such records are usually showed on social media or some sports betting websites to create hype with intention to sell sports betting picks.
5 Statistics Bettors Should Track
I believe that many of you already track W-L record, maybe average odds, profit for sure, maybe game dates and game time, different bet types, etc…
But here are 5 statistics every sports bettor must track to have better idea about his betting performance.
ROI – Return on Investment
The best chance to finish your betting career with profitable result is to start with investment mindset. I see a lot of sports handicappers that confuse Yield and ROI and the main difference is probably in the mindset. I explained the difference between ROI and Yield here. Once we decide to start betting more seriously and once we decide to make a profit, we also must decide how much money are we willing to risk in sports betting. This happen even before we make a first bet. Or at least it should be so. This amount of money is your starting investment. Imagine that you want to open a restaurant. You must exactly know how much money you are willing to invest and this is your invested money in sports betting. After let’s say 5 years, you want to see how much profit you made compared to your starting investment. If you locked $10.000 for 5 years and you make +$7.000, simply divide the return (net profit) by the resources that were committed (investment).
ROI = $7.000/$10.000 = +70%
Yield – Betting Efficiency
Yield is something else than ROI and many many sports handicappers confuse Yield with ROI. Tracking only ROI completely ignores starting bankroll and not having unlimited bankrolls. It will also ignore that investment mindset of locking bankroll for some time and then looking back how much money you made in sports betting.
Yield will tell us our betting efficiency. It will tell us how much money we made every time when we bet. For example Yield of 10% will tell us, that every time we made a bet, we made +10% of profit in average.
The formula is simple. Yield= profit / sum of all stakes
The problem if yield is that will tel you how you did in the past, but will not tell you what you can expect in the future. Plus there is another problem that many miss – sample size. Yield is heavily dependent on the number of bets. Small sample size of bets will give us much bigger and unrealistic yield, which later regress to the mean. Yield is a good statistics, that many bettors don’t even track, but it is still not enough to make a final conclusion about sports handicapper.
CLV and xCLV – Closing Line Value
This is probably the most important indicator if someone is a sharp bettor or not. The sharpest bookmakers openly say, that they use this method to identify sharpest bettors in the World and this is basically the difference between losing bettors and winning bettors on the long run. First we must understand what closing odds are. Closing odds are the latest odds just before the games starts and represent the most efficient line and it is very hard to beat (based on efficient market theory – impossible). This is why it is important to bet early, catch better price on the market than the rest and then we simply track this performance. This will tell us if we truly have the edge against betting market, because never forget, that you are not betting only against bookmakers, but also against others. Sports betting is a relative competition against other bettors.
Closing line value will tell us if the odds drop after we bet and for how much. This is the simplest explanation. More and more bettors track their bets versus closing lines, which is very very good for sports betting world, because it will filter the rest, who don’t even talk about this.
I see that sports bettors track their bets against closing line value on two ways:
- Compare taken odds versus closing odds. (CLV)
- Compare taken odds versus (fair) closing odds minus margins. (xCLV)
The second is more correct because it is not enough to beat only the closing odds, but you must also beat the margins. We can call it also expected yield.
How To Make A Sports Betting Spreadsheet Template
I track both statistics to see if my betting is going into the right direction (if I beat closing line) and I want to see if I also beat the margins when I compare my taken odds versus Pinnacle or any other sharp bookmaker. I named the first statistics CLV and the second xCLV.
BTL – Beating The Line Percentage
If Closing Line Value will tell us for how much we beat the closing line and if we beat the margins, beating the line percentage will tell us how many times we beat the closing line.
P-Value
The simplest explanation of p-value for betting is that this statistic will tell us if our results are by a chance and what is this number out of 100. For statisticians, a p-value less than 0.05 (typically ≤ 0.05) is statistically significant. In other words, if you get the number 0.05 that will tell you that you record is happening by a chance in 5 out of 100 times.
Joseph Buchdahl explained in his book How to Find A Black Cat in A Coal Cellar p-value and it’s combination with the yield and number of bets:
How to calculate it?
How To Make A Sports Betting Spreadsheet Odds
You can use this formula in betting spreadsheet:
Sports Betting Excel Template
- A … number of bets
- B … t-statistic (
Betting Spreadsheet Download
All these information are important. The more information you have about your betting performance, the more you will learn about yourself and how to improve it. Never make any conclusion about yourself, other handicappers or any betting services if you don’t have bigger sample size of bets, because it can be pure luck. Very good indicator of knowledgeable sports bettors is closing line value topic, if they talk about it and if they track this important statistic. Closing line value can tell us much more about your betting performance on smaller sample size than yield and profit. Profit alone, win% and even Yield (US bettors call it – ROI) don’t give you enough information about your betting performance. It is like a quick blind date with a random hot girl, but for a long and happy relationship, we need much more information. ROI, profit and win% is good for marketing, social media and maybe selling sports betting picks, but if we start talking about elite sports betting and serious bet tracking, then we must see sports betting performance from different angles.
If you will track your bets from more perspectives and with more statistics, you will have better chance to become a truly profitable bettor.
I have created a betting spreadsheet for you with video explanation, where you track all these statistics.
DOWNLOAD BETTING SPREADSHEET HERE
Cheers, MB
If you want to learn how I bet and how I use statistics for sports betting you can learn more in Free Betting course.