Smart Sports Betting by Matt Rudnitsky - Book Review

Rating: 2/5 ⭐⭐

While doing my own exploration and analysis, I decided to read some literature to get inspiration and read from other’s mistakes. I picked up Matt Rudnitsky’s Smart Sports Betting: How to Shift from Die-hard Fan to Winning Gambler. As it is a short read (~100 pages) I read it within a few hours.

As the book is short, I’ll keep this review short as well. In summary, I think the books subheading ‘How to Shift from Die-hard Fan to Winning Gambler’ is a bit incorrect. A more accurate subheading would be ‘How to Shift from a Total Idiot to just kind of an Idiot’.

Roughly half of the book is focused on basics, such as:

• The different kinds of bets
• You are an idiot. Also the author is refreshingly open in claiming that he is an idiot as well
• If you’re an idiot, the experts are even bigger idiots
• Juice/vig and how much you need to break-even
• Where to bet
• Track every bet you make
• Don’t buy picks
• Don’t bet more than you can afford
• Bet sizes (modified Kelly Criterion)

The next half of the book is focused on strategies but only discusses the NFL. To be fair, the cover of the book features a football, but nowhere in the title/subheading does it specify that only NFL advice will be given.

The strategy section is pretty light and no concrete information is given, only general guidance. The main theme of the section is that it is very difficult to get an edge on the closing line (efficient market theory) and so it’s best to try and find an edge on the opening line. Even though the opening line limits are low, unless you’re a professional it probably doesn’t matter. So, look past the record of the teams and leverage fancy stats to try and get an edge.

Although the content wasn’t specific enough, I did appreciate how the author provided resource links, and even provided his gmail address for readers to give him additional links. It was also a really quick read. I’d recommend this book to those who have very little knowledge of sports betting (if most of your bets come from parlays, you should probably read this) and are interested in the NFL. Otherwise, I’d recommend The Everything Guide to Sports Betting which I’ll review next.

• 2021 10
• 2020 2
• 2014 2