SportsInsights.com Library -- Summer Reading (Updated June 2008)

SportsInsights has updated its library of recommended books for our Members.  We'll include books on sports investing, sports, financial markets, and other topics of interest.  Below are some recommendations along with short write-ups.  Please send us any book titles you like along with a short review.  

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General Gambling Books

Sports Investing

  • Weighing the Odds in Sports Betting by King Yao gives a good overview of sports betting.  Very good academic approach -- and especially good for sports bettors who want a good overview of the mathematics of sports betting.  The author has a good background in poker and has expanded his successful approach to sports betting. 
  • Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.  We included this book because it is a classic on how the 2002 Oakland A's were able to compete with the major market teams.  This type of book can help sports investors come up with ideas on how to find undervalued teams to "buy" and overvalued teams to "sell."  This is a great book that can open your mind to creative methods of contrarian investing in any market.  
  • Investing In College Basketball by Larry Seidel gives an in-depth look at college basketball.  Seidel covers everything from money management to power ratings to Conference specialization and splitting the season into different time periods (early season vs. late season and post-season).

Poker

Poker has taken the world by storm and is now one of the most popular forms of gambling.  Many of the same skills necessary for success in gambling and poker are prerequisites for success in sports betting.  

  • Winning Low Limit Hold'em by Lee Jones is a great introductory book for people interested in getting into hold'em poker.  Known to be "the standard reference book" for hold'em.  Although it's reviews all of the basics, many consider it to be a "must-read."   
  • The Theory of Poker by David Slansky.  Slansky is generally known as one of the main authorities on poker, having written more than a dozen books on the topic.  This book, The Theory of Poker, is Slansky's best-selling poker book and is a great overview of hold'em as well as other variations of poker (seven-card stud and five-card draw).  Slansky discusses the basics such as the odds, size of the pot, and psychology.  Some consider this to be the best book ever written on poker.     
  • Harrington on Hold'em Expert Strategy for No Limit Tournaments, Vol. 1: Strategic Play by Dan Harrington and Bill Robertie.  This is a "modern bible" of tournament poker.  Harrington is one of the all-time greats in poker, while Robertie is a world-class chess and backgammon player -- as well as author and publisher.  Harrington focuses on key areas such as contrasting styles of play, betting patterns, amateur vs. professional thinking, and getting through early and late rounds of tournament play.  

Finance and Investing

SportsInsights views sports betting as an investment.  You can improve your odds of success in "sports investing" by taking a professional look at statistics and probabilities within the sports marketplace.  Here are some good "reads" on how professional money managers operate within the financial markets.

  • Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets, by Michael Covel.  This is a good book on trend-following and technical analysis of the financial markets.  This kind of quantitative analysis and academic approach is similar to the type of analysis that SportsInsights encourages in the sports marketplace.  
  • Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders (also, The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders) by Jack Schwager profiles some of the best traders in the financial markets.  Great motivational reading for traders and investors -- that you CAN be a successful investor.

Disclaimer
We do not guarantee that the trends and biases we’ve found will continue to exist. It is impossible to predict the future. Any serious academic research in the field of “market efficiencies” recognizes that inefficiencies may disappear over time. Once inefficiencies are discovered, it is only a matter of time before the market corrects itself. We do not guarantee our data is error-free. However, we’ve tried our best to make sure every score and percentage is correct.