Review of Conquering Risk

Title:

Conquering Risk: Attacking Vegas and Wall Street

Author:

Elihu Feustel and George Howard

Publisher:

Academic Publications

Date:

2010

ISBN:

978-1-4507-2300-8

Pages:

280

Price:

$24.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@jetcafe.org

December 3, 2010

There aren't many books out there on the topic of sports handicapping. Few of these have any sort of currency, and even fewer cover this material with any sort of authority. This is the topic of the recently released book, Conquering Risk by Elihu Feustel and George Howard.

Feustel is well known and respected in online sports betting circles. The fact that it is he that is the primary author of this book brings an immediate level of credibility to the project. George Howard is a professor in the psychology department at Notre Dame who has published extensively on the subject of risk, so the authors carry plenty of gravitas.

The book begins with some introductory material covering both sports betting and investing. A lot of this stuff is well known by serious sports bettors, but little of what Feustel covers has appeared before in print. The set-up continues through chapter 7 where the real meat of the book begins.

Feustel presents several stats-based computer models for the NFL, college football, the WNBA, and major league baseball. These models are far more sophisticated than anything I've seen in a book on sports betting before. The reader must still expend significant effort to convert the outlines listed in this book into a working system, but the framework is there. The math isn't all that sophisticated, and what readers might find unfamiliar is introduced as gently as possible. Readers: If you still don't understand the material, consult a secondary source and learn it, because it's stuff you really do need to know.

The book concludes with chapters on props, additional profitable bet types, and stock information. Honestly, Howard's investing advice doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Its quite different from Feustel's recommendations and comes without any serious mathematical foundation, which is important to me since his advice runs contrary to conventional wisdom spelled out in traditional portfolio theory. In fact, while I understand how Howard's chapter 5 on the topic of an analytic approach to fantasy sports fits in with the book, the rest of his contributions just feel out of place to me. This is not to say they're not worth considering, I'm just not sure that this book is the right place for them.

The book seems aimed at experienced and at least semi-sharp sports bettors. Certainly there's a lot here for someone without significant sports betting experience to absorb. In some places I believe the audience would be well-served if the authors were to provide more background, and in other places I find some of the book's information to be unnecessarily elementary. This is a difficult hair to split, though, since the gaps between the knowledge provided by other sports betting books and the basis for this book's information isn't covered anywhere.

I also have some questions about the statistical methods Feustel uses. I think it's entirely appropriate to recommend the use of basic methods and approximations, but I would have hoped that we would be given more clarity about when we're using these approximations and what the consequences of doing so might be. Still, the mere framework presented here is so far ahead of the previous literature, that it's not unreasonable to expect some extra effort on the part of the reader, it's just that the book's audience should be prepared for this.

Despite these criticisms, I believe that Conquering Risks is one of the most important books on sports betting ever written. I honestly don't know if the advice and models Feustel presents are sufficient to provide the reader with an edge at sports betting by themselves. However, I do feel that if you're attempting to be a winning analytical sports bettor, and your models aren't at least as sophisticated as the ones presented here, I suspect you've get little shot at beating today's betting markets. Implementing the concepts Feustel discusses in this book shouldn't be the goal of the reader, they should be considered only a starting point, and anyone who isn't willing to do that much work probably should find themselves another hobby and certainly another vocation.

There aren't very many truly terrific books on sports betting. Despite some material that doesn't seem to belong and an uneven assumption of the audience's knowledge on the part of the authors, Conquering Risks deserves a high ranking. Moreover, my complaints are entirely stylistic. There's no point where I believe Feustel is giving bad advice on sports betting. The heart of this book contains information as strong as anything written in print on this subject. Everyone involved in sports betting should study this book, if for no other reason than as a gut-check to ask themselves if they're really willing to do the work necessary to be a winner. I strongly recommend this book.

Capsule:

Conquering Risks is uneven, and there's some material in this book that could have easily been cut. However, the heart of the book contains such a superior discussion of analytical sports betting that no defects could be so glaring that would make me not recommend this book. Feustel and Howard have put together an excellent book that is a must read for everyone serious about sports betting. I don't expect that its information is enough by itself to make one a winner, but it does a great job of establishing a lower bound on how much energy one has to put into sports betting to achieve an edge. I recommend it highly for all serious sports bettors.