NFL Preseason Handicapping Basics
Betting preseason NFL games never fails to elicit an irreconcilable difference of opinion among sports betting enthusiasts. Some consider it a very poor wagering opportunity, while others maintain that there’s no better moneymaking opportunity in sports than pro football’s preseason. The truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes–NFL preseason betting must be approached with caution and discipline, but offers the potential to make a tidy profit before the regular season kicks off.
The most compelling argument against preseason wagering is simply that the games don’t count. While there are often spots during the regular season where teams may seem more or less motivated, in theory they all want to win. That’s not something that can be taken as a ‘given’ during the preseason, however, as the individual agendas of NFL coaching staffs can very widely. Some might want to win games to establish a winning attitude, others might put a greater focus on working in a new offensive or defensive scheme. Others may prioritize evaluating talent at key positions, while others may simply want to make it through to the regular season without any significant injuries. With all of the uncertainty swirling around preseason football, handicapping wins and losses against the pointspread can be exceedingly difficult.
But like the old saying goes “every dark cloud has a silver lining”. And the divergent agendas at play in preseason football can be seen as precisely why it is a good wagering opportunity. For example, say the Superbowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers are set to play an ‘also ran’ team like the Houston Texans. By regular season standards, the Steelers would almost certainly be favored. In the preseason, however, they’ll often have a different agenda for the individual game. A “better” team has more concern about protecting key players. and usually has fewer personnel decisions to deal with. They don’t need to worry about implementing coaching changes, or creating ‘team chemistry’. As a result, ‘better’ teams frequently approach preseason games as a mere annoyance.
Now, lets look at the other side of the equation. A “lesser” team by regular season standards might have a number of starting spots or key backup spots up for grabs. They may have new coaches to impress, or new offensive or defensive coordinators whose schemes they’ll have to implement. Certainly, winning any games”whether or not they count in the standings”are of utmost importance to losing teams trying to turn things around. Finally, a bad team can gain a lot more psychologically from beating a playoff team than the playoff team can from beating a doormat. A struggling team that is destined to lose a lot during the regular season won’t have a lot of bright spots, so a preseason win against one of the league’s elite can mean a lot more.
Even teams that put a low priority on preseason games don’t want to lose them all. For this reason, a longterm winning situation has been to bet on teams that lose their first two preseason games outright. Over the past twenty years, 0-2 teams in this spot have produced a winning percentage right around 60%.
The philosophy of a NFL head coach is arguably the single most important factor contributing to preseason success. Some coaches always want to win, even if the games don’t count in the standings. Other coaches place a much greater importance on evaluating personnel and giving backups playing time they won’t have the opportunity to get during the regular season. The coaches that have a strong desire to win in the preseason often result in their team’s pointspreads being inflated somewhat, but a motivated team is always worth consideration for a wager.
One of the best tools that a handicapper has at his disposal during the preseason is the Internet. Actually, it’s a great tool year round but during the preseason it is invaluable. The best source of information on coaching philosophies, game plans, injuries, lineup changes, etc, are the local sports pages of NFL teams. Basically, the situation during preseason is that there is a lot of interest in the team and a lot of anxious beat writers looking to write stories. The problem is that there is little in the way of real news, and for that reason you’ll find the sort of minutiae on teams and players from which you can often extract relevant handicapping information. Even if there aren’t any nuggets of handicapping gold, you can at least get a feel for the coach’s goals for the game and the amount of playing time that key players will see. Sometimes coaches will come right out and say who will play at what juncture of the game, and will occasionally go on record that personnel decisions like evaluating all of the guys they’re considering for the backup defensive secondary jobs are more important than winning. Clearly, operating with this knowledge is a distinct advantage and operating without it can be fatal. There’s nothing more frustrating than betting on a team only to have them look like they could care less whether or not they win the game. During the preseason, however, it can frequently be prevented with some simple research and analysis.
In conclusion, there are certainly strong opportunities for profit in NFL preseason wagering but its essential to understand that it cannot be approached in the same manner as the regular season. And, as always, its important to remember that there will be more strong opportunities down the road and that discipline and rigor in handicapping is just as crucial in the preseason NFL as it is at any other time of the year.
Ross Everett is a experienced freelance writer who covers travel, poker and sports handicapping. He is a staff handicapper for Anatta Sports where he is responsible for providing daily free sports picks. In his spare time he enjoys fine dining, fencing and deep sea diving. He lives in Southern Nevada with four dogs and a pet coyote.
Your Poker Persona – Suit Of Armor?
Why is that many serious players of the game of poker want to project a stoic persona? Could they be trying to hide their tells by emitting a somber, almost zombie-like presence? They come off as moody and sinister behind those dark glasses and hooded sweatshirts, like maybe they have holsters and a lightning draw ala Wyatt Earp. Do they know how they appear to others, do they care?
There has got to be some kind of method to their madness. Undoubtedly some of them think they can confuse and deflate opponents by their intimidation and arrogance, thereby, discouraging them from any sound play against them. Theirs is a sullen, bullying persona, which may be the only one they have the imagination to pull off. Some of them may actually be that dark, insolent person, but I rather think that they are hiding behind a lack of creativity.
The player should consider the image they are actually projecting around a poker table. If they were to seriously look at the schoolyard bully persona they choose to project, they would see that while it may work on some of their victims, most of the really ripe ones will be totally deterred from playing with such a dour, frightening type. In other words instead of attracting valid prey that could actually add to their coffers, they are encouraging them to run the other way.
It may have exactly the opposite effect and attract the more secure, professional players who are looking for such an atmosphere so they can practice intimidation and arrogance on you. These guys may be difficult to get rid of because they may sense you to be the weaker player and proceed to empty your wallet. This will keep them coming back for more.
If the sullen, serious type isn’t really you, you are spending way too much time on your phony image and not enough on your cards. It is almost impossible to play several rounds of poker with an impassive faade. While you do need a special poker persona to strategically manipulate situations to your advantage, it should be one that is comfortable for you, not one which takes a lot of concentration to maintain. Your concentration should be focused on reading your opponents personae and the cards that are dealt.
Though one is not advised to be fully natural in poker, one had better create an image which is the most natural to impersonate. A more “openly” social image may take some practice to maintain, but it will result in your greater enjoyment of the game and greater focus, since your mind will be busy doing what it more or less enjoys.
Keeping up a persona radically antithetical to yourself won’t allow your full potential to unfold, since you are virtually playing poker in a straightjacket, while the effort saps even more of your concentration without contributing any vigor to your game.
While a costume of big shades, big hats, and big coats in a darkened poker den may appear to require less effort, for the professional player, it is better to show more of yourself. It takes less time and energy, but you just may become the poker player you always envisioned you could be.
The author is a full time online poker player and makes the majority of his income from his online play and rakeback at PKR Poker. To sign up for a Rakeback account of your own visit Rakeback Solution.
Make Your Choice From Several Online Registry Cleaners
Many computer users want to know if they should use registry cleaners. Several computer experts say that it is a good idea to use a registry cleaner on occasion. They believe that computers will function better if a registry is employed.
The registry in you computer keeps track of your system, meaning your settings, hardware configuration, your user preferences, associations of files, and the software installed in your machine. For those with a little more technical knowledge, you know that the registry tracks the hardware, software, and operating system relationship.
This complicated system, the registry, can become a tangled configuration of settings, information, and engineering. The result of the complicated entanglement could mean a slower running system and a less than reliable computer. It is not uncommon for your computer registry to grow to a large unmanageable size over time.
The result could be an unstable computer. If your computer takes longer than normal to start up, your system might need to be cleaned. Some feel their computer runs faster after a registry cleaning. Of course the process of cleaning your registry is a very complicated process, but you are probably only interested in getting your computer to run faster rather than understanding all the technical processes involved.
If you do employ a cleaning software, choose one that allows you to back up your system. The registry as you can imagine is a complicated configuration that needs to be treated carefully. If the software deletes a necessary key, then you might not be able to reboot your computer.
If you accidentally remove the wrong key from your system, you might not be able to reboot your computer and you will have to restore the whole system. You will be find various registry cleaning software online, some are free to use, while some you have to pay for. Some programs do more than simply clean your registry.
You will find software that also, besides clean your registry, will delete unnecessary files such as temporary files. You can safely delete these files if you need to free space on your hard drive.
You can also freely delete files from your recycle bin if you are sure you will not need those files any longer. Read the reviews of all the registry cleaning software you are thinking of using. If you have a friend in the computer business, ask his advice on the product he would recommend that you use for your system.
When it comes to cleaning unwanted software on your hard drive, it’s important to get software known as registry cleaners. You can read our registry cleaners reviewed and see which ones work the best. You will find what your looking for.
Alliance Leveling Guide – The Best Way To Level Up
Making use of an Alliance leveling guide is the best thing anyone can to level up faster especially now when there is so much content to go through in World of Warcraft. When I started playing the game, I thought it was going to be easy to level up since there were so many levels to go through. Sadly I was wrong and had a pretty tough time.
The beginning of the game was pretty easy and straight forward. The quests were easy to follow, they were easy to complete and also very close by. But once I got out of there, things changed a lot, everything was much harder and confusing. It got me thinking about the difference in difficulty between that zone and the rest of the game, it was a pretty big gap.
So I continued through the other zones. The problem was that there were loads of NPCs offering a lot of quests, way too many for me to organize somehow to get the best time out of them. I used to blindly head into one direction only to find camps with NPCs that had even more quests to offer. It was all very confusing for me.
Even so, I kept moving forward, even if it was at a very slow pace. I’ve tried asking for help in the game, but it seems that no one wants to deal with newbies anymore. All the answers I got were some pretty lame jokes. So I turned to the Internet to find something to help me with leveling my Alliance character. There was a lot of information about all sorts of aspects in WoW, but I needed something more complete.
Searching the Internet revealed exactly the tool I needed to solve my leveling issues, an Alliance leveling guide. It was just the thing I needed to help me enjoy playing WoW again, a guide to help me level my Alliance toon. There were quite a few of these leveling guides so I read some reviews first about various leveling guides and then picked one. There wasn’t any risk in getting any of the guides because they all had the refund option. A few days after I started using the Alliance leveling guide, results started showing.
The leveling guide did exactly what I needed, it arranged the quests in an optimized path so that I would just follow those steps and complete more quests within the time it would take me to just figure out where they were. The leveling guide was very easy to follow because it was implemented within the game, so I just followed the steps in game. This led to me moving constantly thus increasing my leveling speed tenfold. In the end I realized that if anyone is having trouble leveling, they shouldn’t go through what I went, simply make things easier on themselves by getting an Alliance leveling guide.
Searching for the best Alliance Leveling Guide? Well here it is Alliance Leveling Guide.
Alleria Gold: Making Gold In WoW
The World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games played on the Internet. It has millions of players over the world who play both as individuals and as parts of groups or guilds. One of the first things that a newcomer to the game learns is that gold is a very valuable currency that one must have to proceed. On the realm of Alleria gold is more difficult to get than in other realms because there are fewer opportunities to gather mats and other items that can be sold at auction than in other realms.
Alleria is one of the characters in WoW and has a realm named after her. A realm within this game is a world within the world of Azeroth which allows a specific number of players to participate. There are several realms that have been created and the idea is to allow the people playing in that realm to develop a more closely knit community than what can be formed with the millions of other players throughout the game.
Getting gold can be achieved through a number of methods. One may be a gatherer and get gold by selling mats and items that are picked up from plants, dead animals, or have been discarded by someone on a trail. When a person first starts playing WoW the amount of gold they are capable of attaining is also greatly dependent on the profession that they choose. Crafted professions do not have the opportunities to make as much gold as gatherers do.
How-to instructions and forums abound on strategies for successfully moving through the levels of the game. There are however new challenges and quests regularly added so in many cases a person will need the assistance of someone who has gone before to help them to achieve a goal. This was the primary reason that guilds were formed so that more experienced players could assist newcomers in moving through the levels.
Phase 1 of the game provides a newcomer to the game with opportunities to make gold and develop skills that will help them to work through each level of WoW. The quests are easier and the gamer is shown how to research the realms and people they are working for or against. There are innumerable how to books on different strategies for working through a level quickly and getting as much gold as is needed to take on the next level.
Depending on the level that a person is at within WoW, selling items at the auction house will give an individual the opportunity to make a lot of gold from the mats and items that they have collected and also interact with other players and form alliances that will be important later in the game. Many of the people who play this game ardently have been doing so for years. So, the friendships that are formed by players within WoW can last for a long time. It is important then that one develop a reputation for honesty and integrity when playing the game.
When first beginning one will find that the most money can be made from having a profession such as mining or herbalism. Gatherers also make a lot of gold although this is not one of the commonly selected professions. Once a person has achieved their goals for the beginning levels they will need to purchase several expensive items to move to the next phase of the game. So, it is important to develop a strategy early in the game that will allow one to attain experience points and gold as quickly as possible.
Another way to make money at the Auction House is to pick up vendor trash at the level that one is at. An item with gray text indicates vendor trash and items with white text indicate a profession.
To advance to Level 40 of the game an individual needs to have enough gold to buy a mount and prepare for their first profession. This means having enough gold to purchase schematics, plans, etc., that will help them to gain the points they need to further their success.
The graphics of the World of Warcraft game are amazing and in the realm of Alleria gold is very realistic. One feels very quickly that they are a part of a community when playing this game which explains the tendency for many people to spend several hours of each day playing. The challenges and quests provide the opportunity for an individual to grow both personally and in their daily life. One can take strategies learned in the game and use them in situations that may arise in life that make challenges and obstacles easier to overcome.
Learn more about making gold in WoW by visiting Mikey Kovnic’s site on World Of Warcraft gold guides.