Knowledge, is it Useful? A Proof

Knowledge is the Bomb

There's been an interesting thread on the forum regarding lessons learnt in 2013 and one of the points from that is research. And when newbies ask for tips to make the most out of their betting one of the key points always mentioned is knowledge. So I'm going to use the stats from my golf blog to show how important these points are.
While the fitting of the stats to my knowledge base is perhaps a little loose and wouldn't win many marks from a university professor I think you'll understand the gist of what I'm trying to say.

My Knowledge Levels

I started my blog in April 2009 having for the previous 6 months been paper trading and recording my bets on OLBG. I had been successful with the paper trading hence I started the blog. So at that time I had a general knowledge of golf picked up as a sports fan, I knew the top players, Tiger, Mickelson, Els etc, and little knowledge of others, but minimal knowledge of Asia & Japan, and the second levels, Challenge & Web.com Tour as it is now called.
Fortunately as I started the Golf Forum was full of members with plenty of knowledge, names like Muttley Sweep, Swashbuckler & Gecko would regularly give great write ups on events, particularly the main tours. So for the first year I was able to pick their brains and follow their thoughts. Although for some of the lesser tours I was still having to make it up as I went along.
However as time went on the golf forum's quality died off as members concentrated on other areas. I was still plugging away on all tours and at the end of 2010 I was asked to join the bloggers. So I started to have to add better quality to my comments as they were being read by more people, which meant I had to improve my knowledge. At the time I was using a website for the PGA Tour which gave the average finish for the golfers to work out my shortlist, whilst for the other tours it was generally a quick read of the news for the event from tour website.
However at the end of 2011 the website I was using started charging for their stats and so I had to make a decision and so for 2012 I made the decision and started downloading the previous years' leaderboards for each event. 2012 then was about building that knowledge base by downloading and analysing the leaderboards. Last year was therefore the second year where I could build on the spreadsheets I had started and also how to use the information that I had at my fingertips.
Also for the last few months of 2012 the blog section changed and so the quality of the blog entries going forward had to improve. This meant more detail on the event and the course, and not just saying Tiger will win because he's the best. Now I go into events knowing who is leading the Philippines Golf Tour or where guys went to university.

The Year on Year Results

Date	Bank	+/-	%Change
01/04/09	100
31/12/09	141.66	41.66	41.66%
31/12/10	147.82	6.16	5.35%
31/12/11	64.98	-82.84	-56.04%
31/12/12	11	-53.98	-82.28%
31/12/13	185.68	174.68	1588%

So the first 9 months were successful as I picked the brains of the experts, and actually after exactly a year I had reached a high of 249.90.
Year two overall was fairly consistent, but way down from the high as I started to rely more on my own research. That slide continued into 2011 as I more & more relied on my research, which probably wasn't getting enough time as it deserved as I was also looking at various football blogs.
2012 started downward as well and I actually reached as low as -30.34 in Oct 2012. However at around that point the new blog section and so did the turnaround in results, back to the positive by the end of the year.
As I then improved the quality of what I was writing on the blog and also my second year of downloading the leaderboards so did the results and 2013 far exceeded my expectations.

Individual Tours

Looking at each tour and the results I've had then again greater knowledge of the main tours shows out in the results.
The main two tours are the PGA Tour and the European Tour, they appear on Sky Sports every week and have the most detailed websites. Particularly the PGA Tour as they have various rankings & tips each week, and the previous website I looked at gave averages positions for the field. I'm 100.28 points up on the PGA Tour, at 24.88%, whilst for the European Tour I'm also up 29.56 points or 7.23%. A place on each tour so far in 2014 has improved them even more.
In Japan when I started I knew very little, well Shingo Katayama, and so that has come through in my results. It's my worst performing tour down -107.68 points or -44.50%, and that was helped by just my 2nd & 3rd wins which were picked up this year. The other poor performing tour is the Nationwide/Web.com Tour in the US where I'm down -67.36 points or -25.52%, as knowing the new guys coming onto tour each year is difficult.
Just to throw some of those trends out having said my knowledge in Asia wasn't too good when I started it's actually my second best tour in terms of return on investment (ROI) at 35.92%, and a profit of 54.24 points. Although amongst my list of success include Lee Westwood, Padraig Harrington & Francesco Molinari, plus several of their events are dual ranked with the European Tour so the likes of Prayad Marksaeng & Thaworn Wiratchant weren't exactly unknown entities.
My first Asia Tour victory perhaps sums up how knowledge can help. It came at the Maekyung Open in Korea, an event full Korean's I'd never heard of. However I had a look at the course and found out Sang-Moon Bae had had a good result there in the past and so went for him, even though I hadn't heard of him before that. He duly came in at 25-1.

Summary

I guess there is only one thing to say and that's do your research. You will only be profitable by finding the value (i.e. odds greater than their probability of winning), and to be able to work out where that value lies you need to have done the research. So whatever your sport make sure you study the form, be it a horse, golfer, or team.