To begin with, I’m likely to assume if you are creating a sports wager or betting on a sports game you’re doing it somewhere legal (i.e. Las Vegas, or some other place that legally accepts sports wagers). I understand that’s the only place I make some of my sports wagers. If you should be making sports wagers illegally, I’d advise against it, and request that you follow the rules. Enough said about that.
If you should be like me, and enjoy making the sporadic sports wager (college basketball and college football are my personal favorite sports to bet on), then you know how hard it’s to really win money. In some instances, it appears as though the people that set the sports lines can easily see into the long run and know just how many points a team will probably win or lose by. It’s uncanny how often a 3 point favorite wins by 4 or loses by 2 – absolutely uncanny. With that being said, however, I will have to guess when they weren’t that good there wouldn’t be described as a market for sports betting – everyone will be winning and those taking the wagers will be out of business.
If you should be new to sports betting, one of the first things you will notice are all the different types of bets you can make. There are the two traditional bets, called the “money line” and the “spread.” The money line is a bet where you just pick a team to win. Based on the determined likelihood of the team to win, the chances are adjusted accordingly. For example, a team that’s expected to win fairly easily may shell out at odds of 1/10, meaning you will have to pay $10 to win $1. That is possibly the easiest bet to win, although as you might expect, the payout isn’t great (unless you pick the underdog to win, which in my own example might have paid $10 for a $1 bet).
Betting against the spread is essentially the most common form of sports betting. In this case, the odds makers attempt to ascertain several points that’ll make the game fair. Which means that a very bad team will get a lot of points “given” to them to make the game more fair. ไฮไลท์ฟุตบอล กัลโซ่ That which you are betting on is which team will “beat” the spread. Here’s a good example: let’s say an excellent team is playing a negative team and the odds makers believe the nice team is 15 points better compared to the bad team. They would set the spread at 15 points, meaning the nice team will have to win by 16 or more points for you really to win in the event that you bet to them, or the losing team will have to lose by 14 points or less in the event that you bet on them. If the nice team wins by 15, it is a tie, and you’d get your money back.
In reality, this makes betting on sports very difficult from the get-go, since what the odds makers are trying to do is make every game a coin flip. What I mean is, the target of the odds makers is to create the line such that each team has an equal possibility of “winning” against the spread. The cause of this is so hopefully equal money will undoubtedly be bet on both sides of the game, and the casino will make its money on the fee, or “vig,” it prices for each losing bet (typically 10% of each bet). In a perfect world for the casinos they’d have the same amount of money bet on both sides.
As imaginable, however, the casinos actually don’t make very much money if all they’re taking from sports bettors may be the vig. So that they came up with a different type of bet called the “parlay.” The parlay is a sports bet where you can pick several teams to cover or win in a single bet, where all of them have to win. In exchange for all the teams you pick being forced to win, you obtain much better payouts on your own bet. For example, if you pick 5 teams in a parlay to cover, the payout is generally in the area of 25/1. What this means is in the event that you bet $5 on a 5 team parlay, you win $125. Sounds great, right? The problem is, your odds of winning are 3.125% vs. 50% for a direct up bet. However your payout for winning a five team parlay is nowhere near enough to replace with the risk of the parlay.
What this should be telling you is that to be a successful sports bettor, whether in college sports or pro sports, it’s a great deal more beneficial to make a number of single bets that shell out less than to make a number of parlay bets that shell out a great deal more but are much much harder to win. So, the very next time you’re out in Vegas for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (otherwise called March Madness), the College Football Bowl Season, or any other time a great sporting event is on, remember to steer clear of the parlays if you actually wish to win money betting on sports. It would be the best decision you ever made.