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Welcome to the world of sports handicapping. In this article I will briefly go over some basics of sports gambling and possible ways to improve your results.
Not sure how you can bet your money? Well, there are many different ways to bet your money, I will touch on a few but there are many more.
Straight Up or �On the Money Line�- As you progress throughout your gambling experience you will come across many abbreviations and acronyms - especially online. Here are two of the first that you will ever learn- SU (straight up) and ML (money line). This is the simplest way to bet, you merely bet on the winner of an event. The reason why it is called the money line is because you may get a different return on what you bet. Sometimes you may bet $100 and may only win $50 other times you can win $200. The reasons why you will win a different amount on different bets is because all teams are not created equal.
This leads me to betting against the spread (ATS). Because most teams are not of the same caliber, casinos put out a point spread. The point spread is the number of points/goals/runs/etc. that the favored team must win by. Most books put ATS 1:1 meaning that what ever you bet is the amount of money you will win minus the house rake which I will touch on later. Another type of ATS bet is the run line, which is in baseball or can be carried over in many other sports such as hockey or soccer.
Over/Under (OV/UN)- Another type of bet you can make is on the total points scored of an event. When you think the game will be low scoring, you might bet Under the total � meaning that the combined score of the two teams would be less than the Over/Under line on the game. If you think it will be a track meet � they you�d more likely bet Over the total.
Parlay/Teaser- I will briefly touch on these types of bets. They are more complicated and I believe harder to win. Parlaying a bet means that you are boxing more than one bet and betting on all your bets to win. If one of your bets loses then you lose your entire bet. Most people like parlays because you can win a lot of money at once. Teasers are a little safer bet in my opinion. A teaser is like a parlay in the fact that you must win all your bets, but instead of the posted lines you get to adjust the line in your favor for your bets. Usually most teasers offer you points between 4.5 and 10 points, although you can always find more points the more you search. So, if you were to do a 10-point teaser and had a team to start at -10; the team would go to a pk- meaning all the team has to do is win.
Rake- this is what the book takes for every bet you make. When you see a line that says �110 it means that you must bet $110 to win 100. This also means that out of 210 bets you must win 110 of them to break even, about a 52% win percentage. This is why it is harder to win in sports betting. Most people believe that the books want even action on both sides so that the books make money no matter what. I am of the opinion that this is not always true. But I will touch on this below.
Now that the basic bets are explained I will talk briefly about how to bet. There are many places that allow you to bet money on sports from the big casinos throughout the country to small local books. Lately the new way to place bets is online through an online casino. Now you no longer have to do anything but place a bet online and watch the event. Anywhere you want to make a bet explains how to do so much better than I can.
The next problem to address is how much to bet. Everyone has a different system of how much to bet; from different amounts on every single different event to a very strict schedule of bets with the same basic amount every time. Money Management is a key to winning in the long run. It is also the most neglected thing by recreational bettors. There is much written online and in books about money management. The most basic money management strategy I can tell you is this: Take your entire bankroll, which you can afford to lose, and divide it by 30. This number is 3% of your bankroll. Take this amount and use it as your basic unit. This means bet to win this amount if the line is minus and bet this amount on all plus lines.
Money management alone will not win you anything. But combining smart money management and a sound betting system should allow you to do a lot better in the long run. Like most things in betting different people use different betting tools to bet. Some people use trends of what has happened in the past in the same situation to try and predict what will happen in the upcoming event. A type of trend that is widely used is stats. Stats are probably the most used tool of your recreational bettor. Power rankings and specific systems are some things that bettors make by using trends and stats. Most bettors who have been around for a while have tried numerous systems in hopes of finding one that works really well.
Another style of betting that we use here at Sportsinsights.com is fading the public. I have tried a lot of different approaches in my time as a sports gambler and I have not had greater success then here at Sportsinsights.com (SI). Most of the info about SI can be found here at the site in the help section so I will just give an overview and personal takes on why this system works.
Using SI you will constantly be looking at percentages and line movement. If you are new to line movement it is fairly easy to pick up what line movement means. As a general rule you will hear people say that a line is steaming or being bought down or up. All these terms mean is that the line is moving and it is probably because the books got a bunch of money on the team in which the line is moving towards. Why is this important? Why would you care if a line were moving? Some people do not care about line movement, they have a team that they like to cover or win and they see no difference in value between one number and another. However, the more you hang around sports betting you will learn that line movement often times tells you more about a match up then the stats most people read. The reason for this is because the books set the line and they have control over the movement of a line. Most people who gamble understand that the house has an edge. It is no different in sports. Sports books not only have the rake on every bet but they also have endless resources and connections in an attempt to stay one step ahead on everything involving their lines.
There are a number of percentages and numbers that SI puts up for the members to use; including numbers on the side, money line, total, parlays, number of bets, half time numbers, and breakdowns of individual sports books and how the line has moved. You can use all this info to create a system that works well. But if you do not want to create your own system SI offers a few systems of their own. To learn more about how to use SI you must read the articles that SI puts out throughout the year. In these articles it is easy to find something that has really worked well in the recent past and formulate it for the present season.
The last question would be: Why use SI? Answer is because it is a tool that has worked consistently season after season year after year. It is also fairly easy to pick up for those people who have not gambled for a long time. There are also many people at the site that have good knowledge of how to use SI and they are all very open to sharing how they use the info. This is a lot of the basics of gambling, but there is a lot more to learn that you will pick up throughout the course of your gambling experience.
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