Wagers on Games Involving Your Favorite Team

I assume many of us have found ourselves in this situation. We see a line on the game involving our favorite team and it screams at us "this line looks too good to be true! We will easily cover this ..." . We know this because we know more about this team than most people. Not only do we watch every play of every one of their games, we follow every press conference, local beat writers and all the social media accounts of the team and players. Clearly we are more informed ...

This is a case of the "information mirage" or the illusion of control. We are translating the sheer volume of information we have consumed into a perception of higher accuracy when it comes to betting. However, having more information than the public still does not directly translate into having better information than the oddsmakers.

And there have surely been moments in the past where we did bet on our team to win/cover and not only did they, but it happened in some kind of resounding fashion that we will never forget and still brings a smile to our faces (a playoff blowout, a goal line stand, a game winning drive). And let's be honest, there is nothing quite like that feeling of combining a financial win with your own team's success.

And for those who root for teams that are not doing well, some people go for the "emotional hedge" and bet against their team. The philosophy in this case being "If my team wins, I'm happy. If they lose, I win money". This does make sense to some degree, but in reality, this simply divides emotional utility against financial utility. There can be times when you bet against your team, the lose the game and they manage to backdoor cover.

When you wager on or against your favorite team, you force yourself into a corner where only one exact, highly specific script allows you to walk away happy. And you're never going to be able to as objective as you should be to start with in evaluating the game as a wagering opportunity. The best choice in the large majority of cases is to simply stay away from the wager and just purely root for your team.

Full disclosure : I have been a Dallas Cowboys fan my entire life. I think they are going to beat the Giants by at least a TD on Sunday night. History supports me here too. The Cowboys are 7-1 on week one opening games vs. the Giants going back to 2012 (11-1 if you go all the way to 1965). In that 7-1 span, the Cowboys were 5-0 in primetime games and 5-2 against the spread. But as we all know, past performance is not always an indicator of future results. This is a division game at the Giants home stadium in primetime - all of these factors favor the Giants.

And the Football Sharps system's prediction for this game is a very close margin. As of this writing, it is recommending a wager on the Giants +3.5 and is boosting the wager amount slightly using our cover probability model that sees the home, division, primetime underdog covering a high percentage of the time. Expect to see that wager recommendation get made within 24 hours of kickoff.

So I won't be wagering on this game - just rooting for my team to win. I hope you can find a way to do the same for games your favorite squad is playing in ...