Originally Posted by MisterV View Post
Q: How much / what percentage of sports betting is based on skill as opposed to luck? Can this be quantified into the form of a mathematical equation?
Yay. A reasonable question, and not from an "AP!"

When you put aside arbitraging, bonus exploitation, and middles shooting, the actual handicapping results of individual games can be quite "luck dependent." Now I can only speak to college football, at which I'm expert, but in college football, I have certain formulas that determine who should have or which team deserved to cover a particular game. These formulas are dependent, in part, on what style of offense is being employed and what style of defense as to how likely representative a particular subset of plays (in other words, a game) is to being representative of a limitless number of games.

My personal history, after 50 years of applying these formulas, is that about 70% of college football teams that "deserve" to cover actually do. What that means, in essence, is that if you are correct in profiling the statistics of a game within parameters that should yield a win, you will win about 70% of the time. This means, if you profiled every game correctly (which of course no one does and no one comes close), you would win 70% of the ATS wagers, more or less. Now a handicapper who really, really knows his teams is likely to be right about his profiling of the game maybe 70% of the time, so he'll win ATS 70% of that 70%, which would yield 49% or thereabouts. A loser, in other words, However, since he will win 30% of the 30% of games he profiles incorrectly, that will yield 9% additional winners, which adds up to roughly 58%, which is about the ceiling for what an astute, in-touch handicapper could achieve long-term in a particular sport.

The interesting aspect of this is that I'm sure poker players reading this feel the correlative vibes. When poker players in hold 'em games have a higher pair versus a lower pair, they win 80% of the time (although they did everything right if they get the other player all-in, they do not win 100% of the time). An AK versus an AQ, considered a dominant hand, wins roughly two-thirds of the time. So the "luck" factor in poker unfolds over the course of a hand in similar ratios to the "luck" component of handicapping unfolding over the course of a three-hour football game. Just an interesting aside, but it helps non-handicappers get a feel for the limits of handicapping.