How to Bet on Sports for Beginners: 12 Tips to Know

Sometimes moneyline bets are just not worth looking at if the odds are lopsided (Ex. In the case of Premier League champion Manchester City facing a fourth-division team in a cup game). That’s when you might turn your attention to the spread bet, or handicap, as it’s known in some parts. Instead of risking a lot to win a little on a pair of favorites, you can combine them into a parlay and reduce your risk. https://boo-casino.co.nz Parlays also make sense when you can correlate them, something we’ll get into in the football betting strategy for experts article as well. Keep in mind, this article is designed for beginners, so we’ve kept things fairly basic. Baseball is a stat-crazy sport which means there’s a lot of data to dig into for advanced bettors so make sure to dig into spreads and offers provided by various MLB betting sites.

  • Which game is the sportsbook going to concentrate on setting the best possible line for?
  • Second, when a team is coming off a loss they generally play harder and have a statistically better chance of winning.
  • Gamble USA receives financial compensation from advertising relationships with regulated online gambling sites.
  • Along with searching out the largest risk-free first bet amounts, it’s crucial to find sports betting sites with zero or one-time rollover requirements for free bets.

But when you have multiple choices of where to bet you can compare the lines offered at different places. This means betting the same amount on every game and risking only 1% to 5% of your bankroll per play (the bankroll is the starting amount you have at your disposal to bet with). For example, if you are starting with a bankroll of $100, you should risk no more than $5 per game. But for something like an MLB spread, where the line is almost always -1.5 for the favorite and +1.5 for the underdog, the juice will differ depending on the gap in ability between the two teams. That means anyone betting on Philadelphia needs the Eagles to win by 5 or more points. Anyone betting on Detroit needs the Lions to lose by 1-4 points or win the game.

Is Sports betting legal?

Yet even today, 90% of new bettors still use money, as they lack the knowledge and tactics required to make the most of betting. They lack a strategy and essential betting tips that will lead them to make the most out of their money. It’s hard for beginning sports bettors to make a profit, but with these 11 tips you can get a jump start. Dividing your bankroll up so you can bet on plenty of games helps keep you in action longer, and helps you track your results. Specialize in one area, shop for lines, learn about bias, and stop betting on your favorite teams. Many professional sports bettors keep a log of their bets to help identify trends, including winning or losing streaks and what type of bets are causing them.

Select your bet

But if the opposing defender is a quality tackler, there’s a chance that Luis Diaz could be kept in check, and the Reds may have to find other ways of creating chances. As you can imagine, going solely off numbers on a computer screen will only get you so far — you need to watch the teams play. How a team has played against the opponent recently (or against an opponent with a similar style and comparable quality) is more relevant to a bet than a head-to-head matchup from 10 years prior. Below is a list of 10 tips that can come in handy when betting on soccer. There are many other ways to bet on soccer by breaking down the match into other methods of expressing the game’s flow.

What are American betting odds?

Our OVER/UNDER betting guide explains totals betting better than anybody. A fractional listing of 10/1 (ten-to-one) odds would mean that you win $10 against every one dollar you wager, in addition to receiving your dollar back (i.e. the amount you wagered). In other words, this is the ratio of the amount (profit) won to the initial bet, which means that you will receive your stake ($1) in addition to the profit ($10), resulting in a total payout of $11. If you bet $100 at 10/1 odds, you would profit $1,000 and net a total of $1,100. Remember, the sportsbook doesn’t want to predict the final score; they want to create a line that gets action on each side. In the biggest games, like the super bowl, the books take so much volume that they have to spend more energy and time setting the best lines possible.

What Is the -110 Number Listed Next to My Bet?

If you don’t want to wait, make sure the odds offered in each leg are superior to the wager’s break-even rate, as described above. This will ensure you are getting a reasonable return for your risk. However, you need to know how much a half-point is worth when a point spread goes from, say, -3 to -2½, turning a potential push into a win for a three-point favorite. Ditto when it goes from +3 to +3½, turning a potential push into a win for a three-point underdog. The value of that half-point, confusingly, isn’t the same as the half-point difference between -7 and -6½, or +7 and +7½, which could turn pushes into wins in a seven-point game.

Football Betting Strategy for Beginners

With moneyline betting, the lines with plus symbols signify the amount of money you would win on a $100 wager, while odds with minus signs represent the amount you would need to bet to win $100. In the above example, if you bet $100 on McIlroy to win, you could make $800 profit ($100 x (8/1)) and get back your initial stake of $100, resulting in a total payout of $900. If you wager $100 on Scheffler to win, you could receive a profit of $1,000 ($100 x (10/1)) in addition Nitro Casino to the $100 initial stake, leading to a total payout of $1,100. The potential profit for a Cam Smith win would be even higher because you could make a profit of $1,200 ($100 x (12/1)). With the initial stake of $100 returned, it would result in a total payout of $1,300. These numbers represent the amount you could win against each $1 you put at stake. So, if you bet $100 on the Boston Celtics to win, you could receive a total payout of $400 ($100 x 4.00).

A common example for instance is what is known as a rollover (sometimes called “play-through”) requirement. A rollover requirement means that a bettor has to wager a certain amount of volume before they are eligible to cash out any of their bonus money. If a bettor is expecting an underdog to perform better than expected, a spread bet is a way for them to capitalize on that. In the example above, it is implied that Team B is expected to lose by 9 points, meaning that the spread bet for Team B would be +9. If Team B wins, or loses by 8 or less points, the bettor would win their wager. To help, we created this short how-to guide to help you get started with sports betting.

Can the fourth division team keep it to a one-goal or two-goal game? For example, if a World Cup final is level after 90 minutes of regulation, and the game goes to extra time, the result after extra time or penalties is irrelevant for purposes of the moneyline bet. The regular season for both the NFL and college is just four months long, so we want to get as much of our football betting fix as we can before it ends. There can be more than 50 games on a college football Saturday and as many as a dozen games simultaneously on NFL Sunday, while those prime-time games feel like must-bet events. College bowl season is a smorgasbord of football over the holidays, when we’re too busy to research games and probably drinking more alcohol than normal. And the NFL playoffs are so thrilling and intense that we may feel we need to raise our betting amounts higher than usual, especially in the Super Bowl. It makes it seem that no matter what strategy you employ, your point spread bet is a coin toss.

Assuming you’ve got a football betting strategy in place, it’s important to let that strategy play out over some time before considering any significant changes to bet type or size. No matter what you decide to do, get in the habit of searching out the best odds at all times. You may want to tread lightly with the bet size to begin and stick with proven winners in popular leagues. The oddsmakers and handicappers have more information when kicking the tires on these favorites.

We can immediately establish that the Celtics are the favorites, while the odds for Golden State and Milwaukee to win are longer. You would win $159 against every $50 you wager on Boston to win the NBA Finals. Meanwhile, you would win $220 against each $50 you put at stake for Golden State to win. The higher the total payout (i.e. the higher the decimal odd), the less probable (and riskier) it is for the listed team to win. So, you’ve decided to join the hundreds of millions of Americans who bet on sports each year. You have countless options and opportunities to legally bet in the United States. But first, you should establish a firm understanding of how to bet on sports.

Look for options such as credit cards, debit cards, e-wallets, Bitcoin, and pay by phone, Google Pay. However, they should still utilize one nearly effortless tip to reduce their annual losses by 2/3rds or more. This will take a fair bit of leg work, but will ultimately yield powerful results. If that’s too much work, tools do exist on sites like Unabated (paywall) that calculate the value of a half-point based on historical trends. It works because teasers are typically listed at fixed odds. For example, a two-team 6-point teaser is typically listed at -120, regardless of the numbers it passes through.

Choose the amount of money you want to bet and on what team. The money won while placing a bet is simply calculated by multiplying the money you have placed over the bet, called a stake, with all the odds that are offered initially by the bookmaker. Use all gathered data to assemble a winning ticket and wait for the result. Also, you should focus on specific sports and have a trustworthy payment method.

And while an underdog may look like a good bet at +7.5, most professionals wouldn’t pull the trigger if the best number they can get is +6.5. The point spread allows you to get close to even odds on favorites, so it’s a good choice when you like a favorite to win the game by a comfortable margin. You may also turn to the point spread when you think an underdog will keep things close but aren’t comfortable needing the outright upset to cash your ticket. All right, it’s time to kick things off with the first of our seven football betting strategy keys for beginners. Risk-free betting offers are also a crucial decision-making point when it comes to deciding which sportsbook you want to open an account with. Risk-free betting offers can double the number of bets you can make with your first bet. It pays to learn about risk-free betting offer so check out our guide on risk-free betting offers.

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