Football betting is huge in the United States, and there are plenty of places to turn for advice on how to be a winning bettor. Jim Feist and Kelso Sturgeon are well-known names to those who are involved in the sports betting world. The Complete Guide to Football Betting provides their insights on this subject.
The Complete Guide to Football Betting covers a lot of ground. The book begins with historical and background information on the subject of football betting and moves through factors that influence the game, statistics, the line, psychological factors, and betting strategies. There are a lot of topics covered, but I'll give away the ending early, I found very little of real substance in this book. At nearly every turn in the book I'm asking the question in my own head, "So, specifically how do I use this to make better bets?" Very rarely do the authors provide an answer that satisfies me.
The book is often self-contradictory as it seems to go out of its way to avoid specifics. The authors warn against relying on trends, but many of the specific betting examples provided in this book are trend-based. Kelso and Sturgeon equivocate on the subject of power rankings. They use anecdotes to illustrate many of their points, and when they do cite statistics they often use inadequate sample sizes. There's no mathematical or statistical rigor applied to anything in The Complete Guide to Football Betting, or if there is, none of it is made transparent to the reader.
There are some aspects of the book that I do like. The authors advocate a strong work ethic if one wants to win betting sports. They are comprehensive when they analyze various aspects of the sport of football, even though I found their analysis rarely all that insightful. There are occasional nuggets of information or references to other works that I found worthwhile, but there's just not enough of this stuff to make me recommend the book.
The Complete Guide to Football Betting was published eight years before I write this review. Needless to say, things have changed since then. Feist and Sturgeon shouldn't be criticized for not seeing the future with perfect clarity, but the sports betting landscape has changed since the book first hit the shelves making it less relevant today than it was when it was first written. The information found in this book generally doesn't have the timeless quality that would make it continue to be especially worth reading.
I belive that The Complete Guide to Football Betting is a prime example of a book that contains a lot more words than ideas. There are some interesting bits and pieces in its pages, but I believe that most of what's worthwhile here has been covered better elsewhere. If you're interested in reading this book, I'd recommend reading Stanford Wong's Sharp Sports Betting instead. If you've already read Sharp Sports Betting, I expect that most people would learn more by rereading Wong than by reading the book by Feist and Sturgeon for a first time. The Complete Guide to Football Betting isn't a horrible book, there's much worse out there on this subject, but I just don't think it's very good.
The Complete Guide to Football Betting contains a lot of words, but I believe it's short on good ideas. While it is by no means a horrible book in that there's not a lot in it that I think is horribly wrong, the book contains surprisingly little that a football bettor can use to help them improve their results. Moreover, what they do provide of value I believe to be covered better in other sources. Some folks might find The Complete Guide to Football Betting worthwhile, but I really can't recommend it.
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