Review of Sports Betting
- Title:
- Sports Betting: A Computer Expert's Winning Secrets for Betting on Baseball and Football
- Author:
- Jim Jasper
- Publisher:
- St. Martin's Press
- Date:
- 1979
- ISBN:
- 0-312-75330-6
- Pages:
- 196
- Price:
- Out of print
January 31, 2006
Jim Jasper's book Sports Betting was published in 1979
and is now out of print. In the book the author provides an analytic
approach to being a winning professional baseball and football bettor.
It's a fair question to ask whether a book published over 25 years ago
has anything relevant to say on this topic. Certainly, parts of the
book are obviously dated, but I believe the answer to this question
is, "yes".
Jasper begins his book analyzing baseball. Jasper is a computer
programmer by trade, and he uses an algorithmic approach to spot
favorable betting situations. Sports Betting was written
before the personal computer revolution of the early 80s. Consequently,
he assumes the reader does not have access to computer hardware.
So, while his system is fairly labor intensive, it does not require a
computer to carry it out. It should be fairly straightforward, however,
for someone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of computer programming
to automate most of the calculations this system requires.
I don't have any idea if Jasper's baseball methods still work today,
but from my analysis of them there's a reasonable chance that they will,
and even if they're not directly applicable it should be straightforward
to adapt them into a winning system. Again, the author's methods are
moderately complex and very systematic. They also seem like they might
be a reasonable way to handicap baseball games. These days I expect that
every sports book that makes its own lines to have access to similar
information, but there may still be enough hunch bettors out there to make
Jasper's approach viable.
In the next section Jasper discusses professional football betting.
This information is less analytic than his baseball techniques.
In fact, I would guess that much of his advice is no longer applicable
to today's NFL. Some of what he discusses may be interesting to
contemporary sports bettors, but I doubt there is enough of value in
these sections to make this book worthwhile to them.
Given how different circumstances are now compared to when the book
was written, it's impossible not to chuckle at some of the issues
Jasper discusses. Jasper laments not having nationwide access to
trustworthy sports books, the lack of quality information resources
available to sports bettors, and simplifies his systems to make them
accessible to those without computers. I can only presume that the
author is pleased with the way the Internet has improved the situation
for sports bettors. Still, these are minor quibbles that don't affect
the value of the author's books.
Even though Sports Betting is long out of print, copies
are still available on the secondary market. This book may have been
written over a quarter century ago, but it still has some interesting
things to say about professional baseball handicapping. I would think
that those who have an interest in analytical baseball betting would
find this book worth seeking out.
Capsule:
Jim Jasper's Sports Betting may not be the most current
book on the topic, but its analytical approach to baseball wagering
makes it a better book than the majority of what's currently
in print. Some of what the author has to say is very obviously
dated, and I doubt that the football betting information is terribly
useful. However, the reader should easily be able to adapt this material
to the modern era. Those interested in a well thought-out, algorithmic
approach to baseball betting will probably be satisfied if they can
find a copy of this book at a reasonable price.
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