Review of The Professional Handicapper

Title:

The Professional Handicapper: Advanced Teachings in the Ways to Properly Forecast College & Pro Football

Author:

David Paul Greene

Publisher:

self

Date:

2008

ISBN:

978-1438266435

Pages:

90

Price:

$14.95

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

September 26, 2008

Becoming a winning sports better seems like a simple task. All one needs to do is correctly pick games more than 52.5% of the time in order to beat the 11 to 10 house vig. This simplicity is deceptive, as precious few have succeeded in doing so consistently, and in this quest, any assistance we can gain is appreciated. David Paul Greene attempts to provide such guidance in his self-published booklet, The Professional Handicapper.

The first thing to note about this book/booklet is that it's short. It's possible to cram a lot of information into 90 pages, but it's much harder to do so when the book is typeset in a 16 point font with an extra blank line between paragraphs. The first full page with text on it includes one header and three paragraphs comprised of a total of five sentences. The second page of the book has five sentences on it as well. The totality of this particular book would comprise about two chapters in many other gambling books on this subject.

One problem with self-published books is that they often come up short in production values, and this book is no exception. The fonts change, sometimes by intent, sometimes I suspect by accident. There are many typographical and grammatical errors, and the writing just isn't very good. The Professional Handicapper could have used a pass by a professional copy editor, and my advice to anyone self-publishing a book is to not skimp on this step.

The occasional incoherence of the text isn't nearly as big a problem as the general incoherence of the whole book. As the title suggests, Greene provides a great deal of advice on how to bet college and professional football games. The problem is that I don't think any of this advice is very good. The author suffers from several fallacies about sports betting. He seems to believe that the right combination of negative EV bets can lead to a positive expectation.

Greene loves to hedge bets without regard to whether the hedge is, itself, a good bet or not. He also likes to make multi-team parlays and then hedge the last leg. In many spots in the book he claims, "Trust me, I've done the math!" Yet, it's irrefutable that it would be better to leave off the last leg of the parlay than to pay the vig on it twice, once when you make the parlay and a second time when you hedge it. Plain and simple, I don't trust his math. In any case, anyone interested in making hedges should read Chapters 6 and 7 in King Yao's excellent Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting instead of anything to be found in this book.

The author also introduces a few formulas that he uses to compare teams. These are introduced without any rationale or, frankly, any justification whatsoever. Moreover, the statement of the formula and its use in the text often doesn't match. Finally, I just don't have any reason to think that these methods have any real predictive value, nor does the author provide any statistical evidence to back up his claims.

Toward the end of the book, Greene hawks his sports betting service. His selling point seems to be that he's trustworthy and has gone on many "winning rolls", including an 18-0 run in 1999. He makes no claims about his winning percentage, so at least that's one potential area where I won't find his claims dubious. Let's just say that if I were looking to subscribe to a selection service, Greene's would not be in the running.

Earlier in this review I complained about the shortness of the book. As it turns out, I have to recant that objection, as its brevity turns out to be its one redeeming feature. The Professional Handicapper is incoherent and, in my opinion, gives bad advice. This review may seem harsh, but in my opinion this book is even worse that I've claimed here. I recommend that people actively avoid this book, and probably any others written by this author.

Capsule:

The Professional Handicapper is a very short book that isn't well written and is filled with sports betting advice that I cannot endorse. Plain and simple, I don't recommend that anyone buy or read this book under any circumstance.