Cfl Stats and Handicapping

The 2008 CFL season is upon us and pointspread stats are one of the most common tools for sports bettors when making their sports betting proline picks or if you’re from Western Canada you are playing Sports Action with your provincial lottery retailer.

The key to having a successful CFL betting season is having reliable CFL Stats to accommodate your betting style. In fact, if you’re playing proline or Sports Action, then you will need to make sure you have 3 to 6 good football picks to accommodate your parlay. Every body has their own style of betting and depending on what your handicapping style, it’s important to do research on each CFL matchup and get as close to the bookmakers number as possible.

I’ve always stated there are 3 main aspects to sports handicapping; fundamental, statistical and situational.

Fundamental Sports Handicapping: In order to be successful, you need to have the right fundamentals of handicapping your games and I’m not talking about gut feeling on a game, even though that’s part of the self evaluation process.  When you’re looking at the fundamentals of handicapping, you need to look and inquire about football injuries, weather reports, and game time temperature, special events at the game like “Damon Allen Retirement Night” or Doug Flutie Night. Other fundamental football tips are teams playing between a division sandwich, playing 2 games on 4 or 5 days rest, teams playing in a dome or on grass surface like Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton or if a team is playing a division opponent. These are basic fundamental rules of sports handicapping, there are others, but these are common ones to get you going.

Statistical Handicapping: I put allot of focus on my numbers, as it’s the most important factor of them all, because in reality, you’re betting into a number, therefore, you have to say to your self, my CFL ratings or numbers are better then the bookmakers numbers. When you’re handicapping a game, ask yourself how the bookmaker has come up with their numbers and see if you can come up with a better number. Especially in sports like football and basketball, as the bookmaker is putting out a pointspread on the side and what formula or technique does he use to come up with the lines? I have a few betting tools I use to come up with my own numbers, one of them is the ATS Ratings and the other one is the ATS Calculator. The ATS Calculator seems to be better for accuracy on calculating the totals, but it gives me a starting point to work with and from this point, I continue with my handicapping. Try to come up with a system that produces a side and/or a totals number on a game and tweak it until you have found the right formula for beating the pointspread.

Situational Stats: I have a saying in sports betting: “use past mistakes for current profits”. Granted, just because a team played 10 years ago and covered the spread in this exact same game situation for today, doesn’t mean they will cover the spread today. However, when this situation has occurred more than 10 times and you have a 60% or higher winning percentage leading you to the right side or total, at least you have an indication on how this situational stat played out in the past and it could compliment your statistical and fundamental handicapping. Stats are your friend and they are indicator on how a team or a group of teams have done in a certain situation in the past. If you have an EAST Coast team like the Toronto Blue Jays and they are playing against an AL West team during a day game vs. a left handed pitcher, the Jays are 4-15 SU in this situation since 1997. Having known this before you played the Toronto Blue Jays to win, would you still bet on the Blue Jays now?

The CFL season is a few weeks away and having the right stats to handicap your games for your proline tickets or Football pools is an important betting tool to keep at your disposal. If you haven’t tried out the ATS Database for the CFL, it will query anything from Week 1 to the Grey Cup. Ask the database to tell you how the Toronto Argonauts do on grass surface during Week 8 to 12 of the CFL season, when they came off a home lost as a underdog. Or, see how the Saskatchewan Roughriders do as an away favorite when the total is between 43.0 to 46.5 and they are coming off a home win as a favorite, while the last 4 games have gone under the total.

Week 1 of the CFL season is one of the toughest to handicap, as you only have exhibition games and perception of how teams will do based on the player personnel and coaching staff. Here’s some CFL STATS on how CFL home teams did in Week 1 to 4 when the over/under was set at 51.5 to 54.0.