NOTE: This is a guest article from our friends at Unabated Sports.
Some of the most beatable lines that a sportsbook puts out are on player prop bets. There’s great information available to help you do it out there, with data and stats around every corner.
However, there’s one major mistake that most bettors make when they’re first trying to beat props.
Beginner’s Guide To Prop Betting
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To win at prop betting, you need to have the right process in place. Better yet, it’s not terribly complicated. Not to say props are a license to print money or that there aren’t nuances to every sport. But this is a general framework to get you thinking about prop bets the right way.
To make good prop bets, you need three things:
- An excellent source of player projections
- A way to quickly and easily compare lines and prices at different sportsbooks
- A means of making apples-to-apples comparisons between projections and betting lines
It’s step three where most people get tripped up.
We’ll explain how it happens, but first, to understand why, we need to know a little bit more about the nature of player projections.
Use Props.com’s coupon code “PLAYERPROPS” when signing up to receive a FREE 5-day Unabated Sports trial! Using our link/code will grant the redeemer $30 off Unabated products (not including NBA Projections plan), which can be used for a trial or discount.
Sourcing Player Projections
Part of the reason props are so popular in American sports betting is because before betting was widespread (at least legally), fantasy sports – and daily fantasy sports – already had a toehold on the psyche of sports fans who wanted a little side action on the game.
As legal betting proliferated, it came with a demand for bigger prop menus. Bettors got a taste of betting individual player outcomes, and they didn’t want to go back to things like full-game moneylines or totals.
But, focusing on individual performance is actually one of the reasons player props are so beatable.
When you’re trying to predict which team will win a game there are a lot of factors and variables involved. Weather, player availability, travel, rest, an offense’s strengths and weaknesses against different types of defenses. It goes on and on. You need to account for all those things, and it’s very difficult to master.
However, with player props, you’re narrowing your focus down to just one player’s performance. Typically just on a single key stat. This is where DFS comes in.
Because it’s been so popular for so long, there are loads of sites that cater to projecting statistics for players. You can use their subject knowledge to help power your betting.
There’s no shortage of places to source prop projections. Unabated has great numbers for NBA, CFB and WNBA. THE BLITZ and 4for4 do excellent work in the NFL. THE BATX is the gold standard for MLB.
If you’re already involved in fantasy forums or Discords, ask around for some recommendations. Or poke around on Google to see who the current trusted sources are.
There are too many to list and the most accurate ones change over time, but if you spend some time looking around, you should be able to find reputable sources. Just be aware that most sites charge for their projections. But good ones are worth it if you can leverage them into profitable bets.
Comparing Lines
You also need to be able to compare lines at different books. On a Josh Allen passing yards prop, FanDuel might offer Over 246.5, while DraftKings has it shaded to 242.5.
If both bets are listed at -115, there’s no sense in making the job harder on yourself than it needs to be. Bet at FanDuel if you like the Under and DraftKings if you like the Over.
This means having money on as many accounts as your jurisdiction allows so you can maximize your opportunities to always get the best number.
Comparing lines can be as simple as opening up every app where you have an account and looking over each individual line to find the best one.
Or, you can use an odds screen like this one at Unabated to find the best number for your bet.
Odds screens let you quickly compare the offerings at every book in your area to make sure you’re risking the minimum on your bets, and maximizing the amount you can win on a play.
For example, if you like the first player’s passing yards Over, you’d want to make that bet at FanDuel where you pay less juice (at -110 vs. -115 or -117 at the other books) and you have an easier target at 230.5 vs. 237.5.
If you prefer the Under, you’d bet at DraftKings or BetMGM.
Line shopping for the best price is the single sharpest thing anyone can do to improve their results at sports betting.
You can’t gloss over this step and expect to be profitable in the long run. It needs to come as naturally as breathing.
But how do you know what you’re shopping for?
Calibrating Your Numbers
So what’s this big mistake that so many unwitting prop bettors make?
It’s this: they use averages from projections, box scores or other sources as the foundation of their bet.
Say FanDuel offered a prop on the number of strikeouts by Tanner Houck against the Rays. We could use a DFS projections site like NumberFire to look up their number on Houck and see they’re projecting him to have 5.65 punchies. Seems like the Over 5.5 might be a play.
And that’s where it all went wrong.
You see, a DFS site is going to list an average projection for a player. This is called the mean. In DFS, you get more points the more strikeouts the pitcher accrues, so their average is important.
But a sportsbook only cares about bettors going over or under their line. Once a player goes over, it doesn’t matter by how much. As a result, a sportsbook lists a median projection for the line. The point where half the results would be over and half would be under.
These are two very different numbers to try to predict.
When you source player projections, the numbers are almost always mean projections. If you try to bet those against sportsbook lines that are based on median numbers, you’re going to get slaughtered.
You’ll end up betting far too many overs.
If you think about it, that makes sense. A player’s floor will be zero for almost all stat categories. The maximum can extend well past his usual average. Some nights, guys just go off.
Think about an NBA player who scored 12, 3, 17, 14 and 43 points in the first five games of the season. His mean is 17.8 points. His median is 14.
The average is telling you a story that might not be accurate because for one night this player turned into the second coming of Kobe.
That’s a story that will get you in trouble. If the prop line is 14.5 and you’re expecting him to average 17.8, you’re already overestimating what the player is truly likely to produce. Make that mistake over and over again and it’s deadly.
The solution is to take those mean projections and use a simulator to convert them to median numbers you can compare against sportsbook lines.
This is the prop simulator at Unabated. It simulates each player’s performance 10,000 times looking at the projection and range of potential outcomes for that position/sport.
The percentages next to each line are the edge the bet has at that particular book. Percentages in green are positive edges. With our first player, there’s a positive edge on the Over at FanDuel based on the projections we used, but not at the other books.
Simulators crunch all the numbers for you. Based on years of data, we know that a quarterback who averages X attempts and Y yards has a certain range of outcomes available to him.
The simulator takes your inputs and creates a distribution – those bell curves some of you haven’t thought about since junior-year statistics. The middle point in the distribution is the median.
This particular simulator calculates the value of a half point, yard, run, etc., based on historical data to determine those edges on individual bets.
That’s a little more advanced, but the important lesson is that if you approach sportsbook lines armed just with projections based on averages, you’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.
But when you have great projections and you stay out of the mean/median trap, you can level the playing field with the sportsbooks.
Follow these steps and you’ll make a huge leap in your prop betting game.
And don’t ever sleep on the most important part: shop around for the best number in these, or any other bets you make.
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Use code “PLAYERPROPS” when signing up to receive a FREE 5-day Unabated Sports trial!
The above coupon code will grant the redeemer $30 off Unabated products (not including NBA Projections plan), which can be used for a trial or discount.
