Adjusting Your Handicapping Throughout a Football Tournament

When you are handicapping a football tournament, there are going to be a lot of major changes from start to finish for all of the teams and players.  At the start of the tournament, you are not going to have a lot of information to handicap with, but as a tournament unfolds, you will learn a lot from watching the teams compete.  That means you will want to make smart adjustments as you go along. 

Here are some factors to look out for:

• Players or teams shifting their attitudes throughout the tournament.  There are a lot of reasons that teams may not be at full form during certain phases of a tournament.  In particular, there may be games they just don’t take seriously.  Sometimes this is not the reason a particular player or team isn’t performing to expectations, though, so try and figure out the why before you adjust your predictions or hold them.

• Team chemistry.  Some teams work wonderfully together, especially under strong leadership.  Others however have no chemistry at all, and no cohesive game play or camaraderie.  Teams without chemistry will struggle.  Watching interviews and even just observing body language on the field can tip you off to chemistry concerns or a lack of leadership.  Teams in this situation may have excellent players and still fail to progress far in the tournament. 

• Roster changes.  Rosters will be shuffled routinely throughout a tournament.  Usually the changes are small.  If you see a lot of major changes, it may mean that a team is in trouble.  Sometimes this happens because key players are out, but other times it is a result of ongoing strategy changes.  This may mean that the team is unable to settle on a strategy that actually works.  Large, frequent roster changes can point toward panic and uncertainty.

• Watch out for key players being pulled either for injuries or penalties.  Even just one player having to sit out a major game can result in an elimination.

• Surprises.  In any football tournament, there are going to be moments and outcomes that you would be hard-pressed to predict.  A player nobody paid attention to starts to really shine, or a team no one took seriously suddenly bests a clear favourite.  What you need to do is figure out whether these surprises are the result of flukes, or whether they point toward underlying factors that are going to have an impact on future games.

Adjusting your handicapping predictions and your wagers throughout a tournament can be a great deal of work, but it is worth it.  As the tournament progresses, you pick up more and more concrete facts about the teams that you did not have in the beginning.  If you can paint a clear picture with those facts, you can make solid predictions for the future.  While the betting public is caught up in the favourite and all the hype in the elimination games, you will be able to make a much more reliable call on the outcomes.

Read here how you can plan ahead to manage your football tournament bankroll