Review of How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Pointspread

Title:

How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Pointspread: A Step-by-step Textbook Guide

Author:

J.R. Miller

Publisher:

Flying M Group

Date:

1995, 2001, 2004

ISBN:

0-9746168-0-X

Pages:

208

Price:

$24.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

April 19, 2005

When it comes to interest in sports betting, the indisputable king of the hill is professional football. Despite the relatively small number of games, in the United States almost as much money is bet on professional football as on all other sporting events combined. Because of its popularity, a great deal of advice is available for bettors who wish to achieve an edge. In How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Pointspread renowned sports bettor J.R. Miller weighs in on this topic.

Miller begins his book with the requisite background material. This is a solid introduction to the subject of football betting. The author then proceeds to provide advice on handicapping the game. Miller's explanation about how to create power rankings is some of the better sports betting advice I've seen in print. He also does a good job of pointing out some of the pitfalls that can occur when trying to make these methods work in practice. This is excellent material and every football sports bettor should be aware of it.

The book then moves on to cover some of the ways in which bettors might want to modify their predictions based on ancillary factors such as motivations and injuries. I believe that Miller misses the boat a bit regarding motivations. Certainly, these can play a part in professional sports handicapping, but it has been my experience that the public generally overvalues these factors, and bettors should be wary in assigning too much weight to them. Oddly, I believe the author provides excellent information regarding the similar topic of injuries. Miller states that he thinks these subjective factors are generally more important in handicapping than the objective factors he covers in Chapter 2. Myself, I believe the parts of this book that cover objective factors are its real strength.

Miller moves on to cover several important ancillary topics such as key pointspreads, over/unders, parlays, and pre-season betting. Much of this information is good, but much of it is also discussed in Stanford Wong's excellent book, Sharp Sports Betting. There's not a complete overlap between these two sources, though, so I would suggest that the serious sport bettor should read both. However, where the material does overlap I generally prefer Wong's treatment. I was also a little disappointed at the scant coverage of totals betting, especially since Miller agrees with the consensus that these lines are usually softer than betting sides.

I do have some real problems with Miller's chapter on money management. I've heard much worse advice, but the author's lack of familiarity with some more sophisticated math means his advice here isn't very strong. His criticism of Kelly Criterion betting is ill founded. Kelly betting can be mathematically demonstrated to be a superior bet sizing method to the recommendations in this book despite Miller's strong objections to it.

I found How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Pointspread to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, the handicapping advice seems quite strong to me, and generally Miller provides good information, albeit in a rather strident tone. However, it's my opinion that he doesn't quite hit the target in some places, and even misses wildly on a few topics. Chapter 2 by itself is worth the price of the book, but I'd like it better if it were more consistently strong.

While I like some parts of Miller's book much better than others, I believe it has enough good information in it to make it a worthwhile read for any serious football bettor. The reader should be certain to read it critically, and on some of the topics it raises there are other books that I like better. However, this book contains excellent advice in some spots, and I believe it's a worthwhile addition to a serious sports bettor's library. With some qualifications, I recommend this book.

Capsule:

J.R. Miller's How Professional Gamblers Beat the Pro Football Pointspread has some very good information about handicapping professional football games. At the same time, there is also some information that I think is weak, and this can be exacerbated by its strident tone. I believe the good information is good enough to allow me to recommend the book, but I would advise the reader to be skeptical about some of what Miller says.