Where to Find Historical Data to Craft and Fine-tune a Betting System

One of the most important steps when creating and tweaking a sports handicapping system is back testing.  Back testing simply refers to testing your betting model on historical data.  Hey that is great, your elaborate Pythagorean handicapping method picked 3 winners out of 3 plays yesterday.  But how did it do a week ago?  A month ago?  A year or two ago?  A full decade ago?  After all, you’d like to develop a handicapping system that has been consistently winning throughout time.  So, where can we find sports handicapping historical data.

Free Historical Sports Data

Nowadays, there are a few places to get your hands on historical data for sports handicapping and start plugging the data into your spreadsheets.  Without the internet, I have no idea where you could find the score of the Yankees vs Red Sox game from August 7, 1941.  But thanks to this crazy computer and internet thing, we can now go to a website and see that the Red Sox actually won 9 to 5.  We can see that Ted Williams went 3 for 4 that day with 2 RBIs and a second inning home run off Lefty Gomez.

Honestly though, websites that contain what we are looking for to backtest our handicapping systems are somewhat hard to find.  Here are a few websites with free historical data.

Baseball-Reference.com – This is actually where I went to find who won that one game from 1941. It is free and it is fantastic in my opinion.

Hockey-Reference.com – Free site with historical data on NHL ice hockey.

Pro-Football-Reference.com – Free site with historical data on NFL football.

Basketball-Reference.com – Free site with historical data on NBA basketball.

FBRef.com – Free site with historical data on Soccer (ok, fine, football).

Sports-Reference.com/cfb/ – Historical data for college football (not soccer, college American Football)

Sports-Reference.com/cbb/ – Historical data for college basketball

All of above websites can be associated to Sports-Reference.com.

More Free Websites for Historical Data

ShrpSports.com – Another free website with historical data on a number of sports and leagues.

SportsbookReviewsOnline.com – This website actually has the historical betting odds/lines for different sports to add more value to your crafted betting system.

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