Review of Complete Guide to Football Betting
- Title:
- Complete Guide to Football Betting
- Author:
- Jim Feist and Kelso Sturgeon
- Publisher:
- National Sports Services, Inc.
- Date:
- 1997
- ISBN:
- 0-9660332-1-3
- Pages:
- 306
- Price:
- $29.95
November 22, 2005
Football betting is huge in the United States, and there are plenty of
places to turn for advice on how to be a winning bettor. Jim Feist and
Kelso Sturgeon are well-known names to those who are involved in the
sports betting world. The Complete Guide to Football Betting
provides their insights on this subject.
The Complete Guide to Football Betting covers a lot of
ground. The book begins with historical and background information
on the subject of football betting and moves through factors that
influence the game, statistics, the line, psychological factors, and
betting strategies. There are a lot of topics covered, but I'll give
away the ending early, I found very little of real substance in this
book. At nearly every turn in the book I'm asking the question in my
own head, "So, specifically how do I use this to make better bets?"
Very rarely do the authors provide an answer that satisfies me.
The book is often self-contradictory as it seems to go out
of its way to avoid specifics. The authors warn against relying on
trends, but many of the specific betting examples provided in this
book are trend-based. Kelso and Sturgeon equivocate on the subject
of power rankings. They use anecdotes to illustrate many of their
points, and when they do cite statistics they often use inadequate
sample sizes. There's no mathematical or statistical rigor applied
to anything in The Complete Guide to Football Betting,
or if there is, none of it is made transparent to the reader.
There are some aspects of the book that I do like. The authors advocate
a strong work ethic if one wants to win betting sports. They are
comprehensive when they analyze various aspects of the sport of
football, even though I found their analysis rarely all that
insightful. There are occasional nuggets of information or references
to other works that I found worthwhile, but there's just not enough
of this stuff to make me recommend the book.
The Complete Guide to Football Betting was published
eight years before I write this review. Needless to say, things
have changed since then. Feist and Sturgeon shouldn't be criticized
for not seeing the future with perfect clarity, but the sports betting
landscape has changed since the book first hit the shelves making it
less relevant today than it was when it was first written. The
information found in this book generally doesn't have the timeless
quality that would make it continue to be especially worth reading.
I belive that The Complete Guide to Football Betting is a
prime example of a book that contains a lot more words than ideas.
There are some interesting bits and pieces in its pages, but I believe
that most of what's worthwhile here has been covered better elsewhere.
If you're interested in reading this book, I'd recommend reading
Stanford Wong's Sharp Sports Betting instead. If you've
already read Sharp Sports Betting, I expect that most people
would learn more by rereading Wong than by reading the book by Feist
and Sturgeon for a first time. The Complete Guide to Football
Betting isn't a horrible book, there's much worse out there on
this subject, but I just don't think it's very good.
Capsule:
The Complete Guide to Football Betting contains a lot of
words, but I believe it's short on good ideas. While it is by no means
a horrible book in that there's not a lot in it that I think is
horribly wrong, the book contains surprisingly little that a football
bettor can use to help them improve their results. Moreover, what
they do provide of value I believe to be covered better in other
sources. Some folks might find The Complete Guide to Football
Betting worthwhile, but I really can't recommend it.
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