How To Be Better At Sports Betting

4/14/2022by admin

Betting on sports games is a hobby for many, and most people just consider it to be a fun and friendly past time. But there are ways to consistently make money on sports betting, and the tricks are understanding betting strategy and the different types of bets you can make, understanding the odds, making smart bets, and walking away from bad bets. You must bet $110 to win $100, $220 to win $200, and so on. If you win 52.4% of the time, you are something that around 97% of sports bettors are not and that is a long term winner. It will take you 10,000 bets of $110 to win $400 at a success rate of 52.4%. You can get all of The Whale's expert picks for free at: 'Sports Betting Whale' who won tens of millions of dollars b.

Click on any of the buttons in the betting module to select the bet you want to get started. Moneyline The odds of selecting a team to win the event based on the strength of the matchup.

Against the spread records aren’t predictive. Yet, they mean a little something.

The once-a-year bettors who make their way to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl or are figuring out how to download an app in their home state might think that the Kansas City Chiefs were the best bet in the NFL all season. They went 16-1 straight up in games Patrick Mahomes started, counting playoffs. Their offense has been stunningly good in the postseason.

Bettors know better.

The Chiefs covered the spread last week, and that broke a long and odd drought. The Chiefs had been winning every week but their opponent was covering the spread. Kansas City had not covered the spread or won by more than six points since Nov. 1. They didn’t cover in the divisional round against the Cleveland Browns, though Mahomes’ concussion played a role in that.

Kansas City was just 7-9 against the spread in the regular season, the same record as teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars and Detroit Lions. Only six teams in the NFL were worse against the spread, and because the Chiefs are such a popular team to bet on, sportsbooks were quite happy every time the Chiefs failed to cover the spread.

That leads us to Super Bowl LV. The point spread has bounced around a bit. It opened at Chiefs -3.5, moved to Chiefs -3 on Monday and was back at -3.5 on Tuesday morning at BetMGM. Both favorites got most of the bets in the championship round, and it’s likely the Chiefs will get most of the bets in the Super Bowl.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, however, were pretty good to bettors this season and were a good value despite a lot of offseason hype. They were 9-7 against the spread, and 2-1 in the playoffs with two straight-up wins as an underdog. Only five teams were better than the Buccaneers against the spread this season.

In the first meeting between the teams on Nov. 29, the Chiefs went out to a big lead and looked safe as 3.5-point favorites. The Buccaneers rallied with 14 points in the fourth quarter and lost 27-24, getting the backdoor cover by a half-point.

Maybe the teams’ ATS history matters, maybe not, but it’s something to consider before betting on Super Bowl LV. The Chiefs could cover, like they did against the Buffalo Bills in the AFC championship game, but that’s one of the few things they weren’t very good at the past couple months.

Here are the winners and losers from the past week in the sports betting world:

WINNERS

Kevin Durant and LeBron James: Basketball is a young man’s game, but the NBA MVP odds at BetMGM indicate otherwise.

Among the six players whose odds are under +1000 for NBA MVP, two are recognizable legends. Kevin Durant is +600 and LeBron James is +900. Luka Doncic is still the favorite at +350, but don’t underestimate the narratives of the two former MVPs.

Who's winning the league MVP? 🏆 pic.twitter.com/bdTHEE9X9X

— BetMGM 🦁 (@BetMGM) January 25, 2021

Durant, 32, is writing an amazing story. He missed all last season with an Achilles injury but has been great so far for the Brooklyn Nets. He’s second in the NBA in scoring at 30.4 points per game, trailing only Bradley Beal. Durant is one of the all-time greats and looks as good as ever.

Video: Can't-Miss Play: Brady launches buzzer-beater 39-yard TD to Miller before half (NFL)

James is 36 but showing no signs of slowing down. He scored 46 points against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday. The Los Angeles Lakers will be a championship contender again, and James’ 25.7 points, 7.9 rebounds and 7.4 assists will stand out to voters. Karl Malone won his second MVP at age 35, and James has a chance to beat that record.

Even if the MVP doesn’t go to Durant or James, it has been fun watching them continue to dominate against players 10 or more years younger.

Dustin Poirier: Anyone who didn’t buy into the Conor McGregor hype had a nice betting weekend.

Poirier scored an upset as a +270 underdog over McGregor at UFC 257. The line moved from McGregor -190 to -310 as money poured in on him. Poirier’s brutal second-round knockout generated only a few fewer memes than Bernie’s mittens, and was an especially nice win for one bettor.

✅✅✅ https://t.co/VZ1NPgsKrk

— Yahoo Sportsbook (@YahooSportsbook) January 24, 2021

The focus after the fight was still on McGregor and his future, but some bettors might have a new favorite fighter.

LOSERS

Green Bay Packers: BetMGM said the biggest win it has had on a single event the past 12 months was on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Packers in the NFC championship game.

Of course, that means the biggest loss for bettors as a whole over the past year was the Packers on Sunday.

The Packers ended up getting 79% of the money bet on the NFC championship game. They came out flat, gave up a huge touchdown near the end of the first half and had their rally fall short. Aaron Rodgers not running for it on third-and-goal and the Packers kicking a field goal on fourth-and-goal will be talked about for a long time.

The good news for the Packers, assuming Rodgers returns, is they’re the second favorite in the Super Bowl LVI market (yes, those odds are up already at BetMGM). The Packers are +900, not far behind the Chiefs at +600. But bettors might need some time to forget what happened in the NFC title game.

BetMGM in the Super Bowl futures market: When there were eight teams left in the NFL playoffs, only two were a liability to BetMGM when it came to the Super Bowl futures bets it had collected.

The Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Kudos to Super Bowl futures bettors. The Chiefs took in the most bets in the Super Bowl futures market, but at lower odds than the Buccaneers. The Buccaneers were the team BetMGM is rooting hardest against, after they took in the second-most bets but most of them at +1100 or higher.

No matter how Super Bowl LV turns out, bettors got the best of the sportsbook when it came to those futures bets.

More from Yahoo Sports:

If you want to improve your sports betting results, you first need to change your methods. When you do the same things you’ve always done and expect different results, the odds are that you’re going to be disappointed.

But if you’re ready to make some changes, I’ve put together a list of 7 steps to becoming a better sports bettor.

Follow this step-by-step guide and you’ll quickly be able to improve your sports betting.

1. Specialize

Experts in most fields concentrate on one thing. Brain surgeons don’t operate on knees, and math teachers don’t teach English. So why do most sports bettors think that they can make profitable bets on more than one sport or league?

The first step in becoming a better sports bettor is to pick a sport and league and only place bets on that particular one. This makes it easier to become an expert.

When you specialize like this, you can concentrate all of your resources in one area. Instead of gathering a wide range of surface information and details, you can take the time to dig deeper and uncover more profitable information.

First, pick a sport. Which sport do you enjoy watching the most?

Now pick a league or division or conference to focus on. It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to offer enough betting opportunities for you to be able to find value.

Here’s an example of picking a sport and then drilling down to a smaller area to specialize in:

Sport. Basketball
Next level choices. NBA, WNBA, NCAA

It doesn’t really matter which sport you choose, as long as you focus on it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy other sports, but until you build your skills to the point where you’re consistently winning on one sport, you shouldn’t place bets on other ones.

2. Work Harder Than the Bookmaker

Bookmakers evaluate upcoming games and set lines based on what they know about the teams, the players involved, the weather, the travel schedules, and the betting public. They don’t care who wins or loses a contest. The only thing they care about is setting lines that create close to the same betting action on each side of the contest.

Books are in business to make a profit. Most of the ways that they operate are slanted in their favor. They charge a fee to place bets, in the form of vig, and to make money, they don’t have to offer lines that come close to predicting the final score in a game.

Because the long-term profit of the sports book is the most important thing to them, they spend a great deal of time and effort investigating upcoming games so they can set lines that create the highest rate of return.

This means that if you want to learn how to be a better sports bettor, you need to figure out how to do a better job of evaluating games than the bookmakers do, and/or be able to evaluate games so that you can accurately predict the outcomes and find the areas where your predictions don’t agree with the lines set by the books.

To do this, you would either have to be smarter than the people working for the bookmaker, or work harder than the books.

The good news is that the bookmakers only have a limited amount of time and manpower to spend on each game and line. And most books offer hundreds of lines a week, so you can find areas where you can outwork them.

They spend most of their time producing solid lines for the games that have the highest betting totals and spend less time and energy on games that aren’t as popular.

This means two important things to sports bettors. The first thing is that popular games are often more difficult to find value on. The second thing is that less popular games often have looser lines.

If you’re willing to spend more time on less popular games and work harder than the bookmakers, you can start finding valuable betting opportunities on a regular basis.

When you learn how to do this, it can create a large improvement in your results. As you master it, the biggest problem you’re going to have is figuring out how to make big bets on small games.

3. Learn How to Find Value

The key to every winning sports bettor is finding games with lines that offer value. This is a process that focuses on the long term. You have to learn how to consistently find value and be able to ride out the ups and downs of sports betting.

On plus and minus betting lines, the best bettors only win around 55% of the time. But if you can win 55% of the time, you can make a great deal of money.

But this also means that the best bettors lose 45% of the time. But over time, if they can continue finding value and riding out the ups and downs, they can create long-term profit.

It might seem like it’s simple to figure out how to win 55% of the time, but only a few bettors are able to do it. The truth is, depending on the amount of vig on the bets you place, you can show a long-term profit by winning 52 to 53% of the time. And even this is challenging.

When you start looking for lines that offer value, you need to find games that the bookmakers have made a mistake on when setting their lines, or have lines that have been moved one way because the books are trying to balance their totals.

Based on many things, lines can be adjusted before they’re published, and can be adjusted after bets start coming in when too much money comes in on one side of the contest.

The key is figuring out how to evaluate games accurately so you can find lines that can be exploited.

Here’s an example:

Bookmakers know that bettors often make bets with a home team bias. They also know that teams that are heavily favored are sometimes bet on with a big name or big team bias.

How To Be Better At Betting

When a powerhouse program like the Alabama NCAA football team plays at home against a weak opponent, the books know that most of the money is usually bet on Alabama. They take this into account when they set the line.

If they determine that Alabama will probably win the game by 24 points, they might set the line at Alabama. 27 when they publish the opening line.

If you also determine that Alabama will win by 24 points, you can bet on the opponent and receive 27 points. This is a value bet.

You can’t blindly bet on the underdog in games with home team and big team bias, but it’s one area where you can look for possible value on a game-by-game basis.

Every game that you consider betting on needs to be evaluated and compared to the available lines. Only make bets on games where you find value. As you gain experience and improve your evaluation abilities, you can become a better sports bettor.

Because sports betting is based on games played by humans, it’s impossible to predict specific outcomes. This doesn’t mean that you don’t try to predict the outcomes-just that it’s difficult to do.

This is why becoming a winning sports bettor is challenging.

It also means that not every game that looks like it offers value will work out as a winner. But if you can find value in enough games, you can win more than you lose. But you also need to realize that you need to look at your abilities over a long period of time.

If you place bets that really offer value over time, you’re going to make money. Anything can happen in the short term, but over time, your ability will show through.

This means that you need to consistently try to improve your abilities and track your results. This is the only way that you can see if you’re finding true value or if you need to adjust your strategy.

4. Build Your Network

If you want to become a better sports bettor, you need to consider building two different types of networks.

The first network you need to build is a network of people and information–sources that provide you with the details you need to find value. The people can be anyone connected to a team or teams that you follow, anyone in the news media that may have access to inside information, or anyone else who may be able to provide details you need to make good decisions.

Other information sources can include websites, newspapers, television programs, forums, or anywhere else that publishes or has information available.

The bookmakers have their own networks, and your goal should be to build better ones than the books use. If you can develop relationships with people associated with the teams in the conference you track, you might be able to access important information before the sports books do.

Information is the king of profitable sports betting, and the bigger your information network is, the better your chances to find information that can help you find value bets and lines.

The second kind of network that can be valuable to you as a sports bettor is a network of people and/or places where you can place bets with reduced or no vig.

We’ll cover more about paying lower vig in the last section on this page.

5. Focus on Small, Not Big

I touched on this earlier on the page, but if you want to be a profitable sports bettor, you should focus on small, not big. Smaller conferences produce more opportunities to find value than big conferences do. And less popular games usually offer a better chance at finding value than popular games do.

Most people watch the big games, and the media covers them more than they cover most less-important games combined. But this often creates tight lines where it’s hard to find value.

The reason I’ve included this in more than one place is because it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your sports betting.

Here’s a real-world example that illustrates how profitable focusing on small can be.

I live near a small conference NCAA football team. They receive a small amount of national coverage, but most of their media coverage is local. I have access to all of the local media and know people who work at the University.

It’s easy to attend functions where you can form relationships with the people involved with the football and basketball programs. Getting introduced to coaches and players is easy at a small college.

The key to this is to not let anyone know you’re a sports bettor. Colleges are scared to death of anything that has to do with gambling involving their teams. Just act like a fan, and you may be surprised at the things you learn that can help you find value.

Some things are simple, like being aware of injuries that the bookmakers don’t know about, but other things can be just as powerful. If you know that the starting quarterback or running back has been out partying the night before a game or that the starting point guard just got dumped by his girlfriend, it can be valuable.

When these things happen at schools covered on a national level, they become big stories and everyone hears about it. But at a small school, you can develop sources for information that never becomes public.

6. Don’t Bet Too Much on One Game

Earlier, I covered how winning sports bettors win between 52% and 55% of the games they bet on. This means that they have winning and losing streaks.

Because of this, you need to be careful of how much you bet on any single game or small group of games in relationship to your total bankroll. You want to bet as much as possible to maximize your wins, but you have to make sure that a losing streak doesn’t damage your bankroll so much that you can’t make future bets.

Your tolerance of risk and how easily you can replace your bankroll need to be factored in, but you should have a standard bet amount or bet range based on a percentage of your bankroll.

I suggest betting between 1% to no more than 5% of your total bankroll on any single contest.

If you bet 5% of your total bankroll on a single game, you only have enough for 20 games. While the odds are long that you’re going to lose 20 straight games, you can still take a big hit if you have a bad day or week.

If you bet 2% of your total bankroll per game, you have enough to cover 50 games. This is a more comfortable area.

You can also use a small range that’s based on how much value a game offers. You might bet 2% on games that offer smaller value, and 3% or 4% on game that offer more value.

7. Pay Lower Vig

The vig that you pay doesn’t directly change your ability as a sports bettor, but it does change your long-term profits and losses. So if you can place bets with reduced vig or with no vig, it means you need to win less to show a profit.

The standard vig at most bookmakers is betting $110 to win $100. But many books offer specials from time to time with reduced vig of $105 to win $100, or offer it on certain sports or games every week.

The only way to make bets with no vig is by finding other people to bet with. If you place bets with no vig, you only need to win slightly over 50% of the time to show a long-term profit.

Best Sports Betting Stock

You can start building a network of sports bettors who you can place bets with. This creates some different challenges than you would face when betting with a bookmaker, but if you’re smart and careful, it can be a good way to make at least some of your bets without paying vig.

Start by asking other people you know who bet on sports about making bets with you. It helps to find fans of different teams who like to bet on their favorite teams. Over time, if you keep your eyes open, you can build an extensive network of possible betting partners.

Conclusion

How To Be Good At Sports Betting Reddit

These 7 steps to becoming a better sports bettor are a good place to start if you want to win more. It’s difficult to become a winning bettor, but it can be done. Learn how to find value, build your networks, and watch your bankroll, and you can become a winning sports bettor.

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