To begin with, I am going to assume if you should be creating a sports wager or betting on a sports game you are doing it somewhere legal (i.e. Las Vegas, or various other place that legally accepts sports wagers). I am aware that’s the only real place I make some of my sports wagers. If you are making sports wagers illegally, I’d advise against it, and request that you follow the rules. Enough said about that.
If you are like me, and enjoy making the sporadic sports wager (college basketball and college football are my personal favorite sports to bet on), you then understand how hard it’s to actually win money. In some instances, it appears as though the folks that set the sports lines can easily see into the near future and know just how many points a group 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 would have to guess that when they weren’t that good there wouldn’t be described as a market for sports betting – everyone would be winning and those taking the wagers would be out of business.
If you are new to sports betting, one of the first things you will notice are most of the several types of bets you can make. You will find the two traditional bets, called the “money line” and the “spread.” The amount of money line is a bet where you simply pick a group to win. Based on the determined likelihood of the team to win, the chances are adjusted accordingly. As an example, a group that’s anticipated to win fairly easily may shell out at odds of 1/10, meaning you would have to pay $10 to win $1. This really is perhaps 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 example would have paid $10 for a $1 bet).
Betting against the spread is probably the most common form of sports betting. In this case, the odds makers attempt to determine several points that’ll make the overall game fair. Which means an extremely bad team will receive a large amount of points “given” to ไฮไลท์ฟุตบอล them to help make the game more fair. What you are betting on is which team will “beat” the spread. Here’s an illustration: let’s say a great team is playing a bad team and the odds makers believe the great team is 15 points better than the bad team. They’d set the spread at 15 points, meaning the great team would have to win by 16 or even more points for you really to win if you bet to them, or the losing team would have to lose by 14 points or less if you bet on them. If the great team wins by 15, it is a tie, and you’d get your money back.
In reality, this makes betting on sports very hard from the get-go, since what the odds makers want to do is make every game a coin flip. What I am talking about is, the goal of the odds makers is to set the line in a way that each team has an equal potential for “winning” against the spread. The cause of that is so hopefully equal money is likely to be bet on both parties of the overall game, and the casino will make its money on the fee, or “vig,” it charges for each losing bet (typically 10% of each and every bet). In an ideal world for the casinos they’d have a similar amount of cash bet on both sides.
As you can imagine, however, the casinos actually don’t make that much money if all they are taking from sports bettors is the vig. So they really created 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 one bet, where they all need certainly to win. In exchange for most of the teams you pick being forced to win, you obtain far better payouts in your bet. As an example, if you pick 5 teams in a parlay to cover, the payout is usually in the region of 25/1. This means if 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 straight up bet. But your payout for winning a five team parlay is nowhere near enough to make up for the danger of the parlay.
What this should be suggesting is that to be always a successful sports bettor, whether in college sports or pro sports, it’s much more beneficial to create a bunch of single bets that shell out significantly less than to create a bunch of parlay bets that shell out much more but are much much harder to win. So, next time you are out in Vegas for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (otherwise called March Madness), the College Football Bowl Season, or some other time a good sporting event is on, remember to avoid the parlays if you really desire to win money betting on sports. It will be the best decision you ever made.