Have you ever sat back and thought about assessing your sports handicapping skills? Do you randomly choose which game and/or team you will bet on?

Today’s sports betting industry is filled with professional handicappers selling selection packages for every major betting sport.

There are no guarantees that you will make a positive return on investment going with a pro. However, if you perform the proper due diligence when seeking one out, you will improve your chances to make money even with the added cost of buying a pick package.

The first step in the process is to properly assess and evaluate your own sports handicapping skills. By gaining a better understanding of how your are doing on your own, will define the need to turn elsewhere for your picks.

It is not enough to know whether you are up or down for the year. You need to dig much deeper into your actual results.

The first important distinction is knowing your winning percentage on a sport-by-sport basis. Maybe you are way up for bets placed during the most recent MLB and/or NHL season. 

Since MLB and NHL money lines are the primary way to bet the games, dollars won or lost is a more important measure than the winning percentage on the number of bets placed.

Overall, you can have a winning record betting money lines for any sport and still lose money with a heavy lean towards betting favorites. You can also have a losing record betting money lines and still make money with a heavy lean towards betting underdogs.

Moving on to bets places on football and basketball point spreads, the actual winning percentage of those bets is a key indicator of your overall handicapping skills. This is especially true if you bet the same amount of money on every game. 

The winning percentage is also a very important measure for all the total line bets placed for a particular sport.

The primary purpose of digging this deep into recent results is to paint an accurate picture of your strengths and weaknesses as a sports handicapper and a sports bettor. 

If you posted losses all the way around no matter which bets you placed on whatever sports, you can stop reading this article right now and start looking for a pro to work with.

However, there is a good chance that certain patterns will emerge. By assessing your sports handicapping skills, you should uncover some strengths and some weaknesses in your overall sports betting strategy.

You might find that you made money betting college football but you lost money betting the NFL. 

This could be due to the heavy outside influence that media has on the handicapping process. You may have been swayed one way or the other when formulating your picks for NFL games. This influence could easily be subconscious to create a bias of which you were not even aware.

First you to have determined your strengths and weaknesses as a sports handicapper. Then you can take steps to minimize those weaknesses while maximizing the strengths.

If you are a lousy handicapper for MLB games, stop betting on that sport or buy a professional capper selection package for the next season.

If one of your strengths is betting NFL money lines, stay away from betting the point spread for the games.

The more specific the analysis of your past performance is, the easier it becomes to enhance those strengths to improve your overall return. Here’s to becoming smarter bettors by honestly assessing your sports handicapping skills.