Anyone has the potential to be a sharp sports bettor with the right info. Learn about the types of sports bets you can place, how to read odds, and how to manage your bankroll to get the most value out of your wagers. We noticed you're from bavaria where legal online sports betting is not currently available.

Enjoy risk-free action while you wait at SBD Play. NBA NHL MLB NCAAB Upcoming Match-ups. Sports Betting Sports Betting Top Guides. Gorilla is an understatement. These guys were King Kong. They kicked our asses every year. In , they were undefeated, well coached, confident, and clearly outmatched us at every position.

Their quarterback was even dating the homecoming queen from our high school. Our goal was to avoid complete embarrassment. But it was Friday the 13th, after all. Strange things happened. On the opening drive of the game, the Trinity quarterback faked a handoff to the dive back, reverse-pivoted on the bootleg and ran smack into not one of our players but the referee, fumbling away the football.

That lucky break was followed by another, and before we knew it, we were ahead. Then the guys actually started to play well — really well. We uncharacteristically caught every ball and made every tackle.

We got every lucky bounce and every lucky call. And when the final whistle blew, we had beaten the gorilla by a gaudy 53—7 score. So we did what teenagers do: We celebrated. Starting with the dogpile on the field at the end of the game, to the bus ride home, into the weekend. We just finally figured it out, right?

We must be way better than we thought we were all along. There were so many broken arms from patting ourselves on the back that the training staff had to order more slings.

In our to-7 euphoria, we forgot we had to, you know, show up and play in the last three games of the season. The cliché fairy summarily revoked our David Beats Goliath status and put us into Chickens Coming Home to Roost mode.

We looked like the Bad News Bears from the early part of the movie, not later on when they went to the Astrodome and Walter Mathau starting believing in them. We were lazy and sloppy in every aspect of the game, just as we had been in practice all week, and lost that game to an inferior opponent.

Playoff dream: dashed. But in retrospect, there was something totally inevitable about that eight-day roller-coaster that ended in that ignominious crash-and-burn.

We overlearned from the positive outcome of one week and formed a collective illusion that we could beat anybody without trying. We had just a little less focus in practice than normal. We were late getting to our spots. We ran a little slower; we cadillacked our way through the toughest drills.

My acne-splotched, mullet-topped team in could have won the state championship if we played every game like we did the night of October 13, and with the same level of measurable talent and the same coaches, ten repeats of our October 20 performance would have led to a winless season.

In college, I got interested in sports betting, and I did so with the lessons of October firmly in my mind: Not the lesson where freedom triumphs over tyranny in Eastern Europe, but that talent and measurable attributes only determine part of what happens on the field of play.

They have memories. They have biases. They react to things that happen to them. And while none of those things are easily measurable, they can show up at game time, in the same way that the Grapevine Mustangs reacted to their big win, and lay an egg. My approach to sports betting is based on the essential premise that people and teams react predictably to events like winning, losing, surprise, disappointment, travel, breaks, and so on.

Today more than ever, the truth is out there and only a click or two away. I spent countless hours creating a database of sports scores and statistics from scratch on my ancient computer. That same information that I painstakingly collected is available today from dozens of web resources.

And for the more enthusiastic gamblers, tools are out there to study and bet on any pattern they can dream up. There are two basic approaches to picking winners: numbers driven, or technical analysis, and information driven, or fundamental analysis. There is no one formula for success.

The probabilities associated with cards, dice, and the little bouncing ball on the roulette wheel mean the aggregate outcome is not in doubt. Narrow your focus to a single lucky person, or a single weekend in Las Vegas, or a crazy craps table, and it seems like there are winners everywhere.

But the math makes it a physical certainty that the more people play, the longer they play, the more certain it is the gamblers are going down. But sports betting is different. The sports bettor reads a menu of available bets at the bookmaker and decides whether or not to risk some of his bankroll on a certain outcome.

Short of doing something the casinos would frown upon, the greatest blackjack, craps, and roulette players in the world will lose money at those games if they played forever.

Sports betting is under no such stricture. Unlike table games at the casino, there is no physical or mathematical law that says, without a doubt, you will lose money gambling on sports.

You just might be that unicorn who can spot those Grapevine-beats-Trinity moments better than anyone else in the world.

I mean many, many more lose than win. But since there are no mathematical certainties here as there are with cards and dice, we have to get empirical. First off, I want to make it clear. If you asked 50 people in line at a sports book if they were ahead or behind in their lifetime of sports bets, all 50 would say they were ahead.

So simply asking people to self-report results is a nonstarter when it comes to sports books. Research on data pulled from a prominent European sports book a few years ago showed that only 10 to 15 percent of bettors were ahead a year after making their first deposit. A big swathe of people had lost a little, and there was a long tail of people who had lost their initial deposit plus money from subsequent deposits.

Another source of data is tightly controlled sports betting contests, where entrants must make regular picks on sports events as if they were bets. Have you ever tracked sports writers in a newspaper picking weekly games? In spite of being plugged into sports news, of the eight pickers in The Dallas Morning News, only a few were above 50 percent, and only a single sports writer was in profitable territory north of Maybe 15 percent is accurate after all.

Another example is the world-famous Station Casinos SuperContest Gold. Each contestant has to make five NFL picks every week against a menu of standard odds.

In the — contest, there were 42 contestants who would have showed a profit if they had been betting an even amount on each game. These contest results should tell you a few things: First, the contest winner picked games at a seemingly modest 61 percent.

So set aside your delusions of grandeur. The luckiest, most talented pickers barely sniff the 60s. Second, the combined average of these plus bettors was about 48 percent winners.

So you might take heart in the fact that one-third of these contestants were able to pick profitably. Winning is within the grasp of a bettor who is willing and able to put the time in. Tip Pro gamblers will tell you that 55 percent wins is the day-job line.

If you can beat 55 percent on a year-in, year-out basis, you can quit your day job in favor of sports betting. Sounds great right? Unfortunately, the odds are against you. It takes dedication to the craft and special talent to get to that level. The sweet spot between In a landmark decision in , the U.

Supreme Court finally released Americans from the shackles of earlier legal decisions that prevented them legally from doing something that is so common and comfortable that millions of us were already doing it.

I'm not exaggerating about that number. If you count fantasy sports and office pools, there are tens of millions of people who have money riding on the outcome of an athletic event. But for the majority of people who partake, betting on sports is not only fun and entertaining, but it borders on the sublime.

Athletic competition and gambling are practically written into our DNA. For students of American history, the banning and subsequent unbanning of sports betting has echoes of the Volstead Act and the Prohibition Era.

Nobody would claim alcohol consumption is good for your health, but to suddenly disallow a habit already so, er, engrained, in so many millions of people looks in retrospect to be ludicrous. At the same time, that instinctive drive to bet as an enjoyment multiplier leads many people to bet from the hip.

Betting instinctively certainly has its place. You might win; you might not. You know how it works: As with any hobby, the vocabulary you use is a passport to respectability.

Remember Your first lesson in lingo is a pair of terms: sharp and square. Both words serve as both nouns and adjectives. A sharp is an experienced, discriminating sports bettor who wins money in the long run. And no, a square is not the only person at the high school party who refuses to break the rules for fear of getting caught.

In this world, a square is an average member of the betting public. Most people are squares. Being square also means that you not only are ignorant of but you also misinterpret and misunderstand key concepts in sports betting — to the detriment of your bank account.

Squares have degree angles. I hit my head on the corner of a square table when I was a kid and it felt pretty sharp to me. In Figure , I attempted a Venn diagram of the betting population, but instead of circles and ellipses I used squares and triangles as an attempt to match the terminology.

Bettors who know the word will always claim to be sharp. Nobody claims to be a square, and many more claim to be sharp than actually could possibly show a long-term winning record.

Forget sharp and square. I want you to get better at betting and to have fun. Somewhere along the continuum of betting skill and knowledge, a person moves from complete ignorance to a level of dangerous knowledge where you think you know more than you do and probably risk more than you should.

The pros know more than is teachable in a book. In between squares and full-on professionals is the territory you should target.

Being an advantage bettor is a reasonable goal for a reader of this book. Imagine a game where you and a friend are betting on the outcome of a coin flip.

You could theoretically play forever, right? No gain, and no pain. I talk more about calculating odds later, but on any bet, your expected return is the sum of the outcomes multiplied by their probabilities. In the coin flip game, it should be intuitive that your expected rate of return is 0, but just to show the work:.

When you place a bet with a bookmaker, that bookmaker charges a commission that varies depending on the bet and the bookmaker that reduces the amount of your winning payout. A bookmaker, or bookie, is an organization or individual legally sanctioned or not that accepts bets on sporting events.

Bettors make a bet by staking cash or credit on a certain outcome, and are given a virtual or paper ticket receipt that describes the wager and the payout.

In the event their bet wins, they exchange the ticket for the bet payoff. Remember On average, a bookmaker keeps 1 cent for every 22 cents wagered: a 4. If you were to make your coin flip bet at a bookmaker, the terms would be altered slightly to your distinct disadvantage.

Even if the coin is fair, the game is now tilted against you. You select which bets to make and which to pass on. The bookie, as a rule, has a stake on every game. But the bettor gets to pick and choose.

With a 4. I like to think of the number. Remember those newspaper writers from The Dallas Morning News earlier in this chapter?

Six of the eight writers picked north of 50 percent but less than But that analogy should end at edge of the casino floor. Warning Break-even bettors have to win Professional sports bettors would be thrilled if they could win a mere 56 or 57 percent of their bets in the long run.

The point is, look at how thin the margin is between a victory and defeat: A break-even bettor and a dart-throwing square bettor are perilously close in terms of wins and losses. Over the course of a year, the square is slowly going broke, averaging 3 wins and 3 losses per week.

To be a break-even bettor, the square need only convert one betting week out of every 6 from 3 wins and 3 losses to 4 wins and 2 losses. That means winning just one additional bet for every 36 placed! Giving you the tools to raise your winning percentage a few points seems like a reasonable goal for this book.

Of course, another thing you probably infer from having such thin margins between success and oblivion is that these results play out over a very long time scale. When I talk about bankroll management in Chapter 5, I discuss ways to judge your long-term success.

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Explore Magazines. Editors' Picks All magazines. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Cancel anytime. Ebook pages 9 hours. Switch to audiobook. Read free for days. Read preview. About this ebook The sports gambling book you can bet on Sports betting combines America's national pastime sports with its national passion gambling.

Betting on football, basketball, baseball, and other sports Betting on special events, such as the Superbowl or the Olympics Money management Betting on the internet With handy tips, tricks, and tools, Sports Betting For Dummies shows you how to place the right bet at the right time—to get the right payoff.

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Ebook Sports Betting Black Book by Darryl Craig. Bonus offers are the best way to inject your bankroll with instant cash, which is vital for bettors that are just beginning to bet on sports. Odds boosts or promotional odds on many different events are now available every day at many major online sportsbooks.

These appear every day at various sportsbooks and are an excellent way to build your bankroll. One of the biggest mistakes new bettors make is thinking that sports betting is a get-rich-quick scheme.

The reality is that it is a massive grind. Sportsbooks publish news stories about players hitting massive parlays because if all their customers keep betting parlays, they will have no trouble filling up their balance sheets with more profits.

The truth is, straight wagers have much smaller for sportsbooks compared to parlays, teasers, and many other exotics. This knowledge should be sports betting , but in fact, it seems as if bettors do the opposite. Their betting slips are full of 10 team parlays rather than straight wagers on markets that offer value.

There are no successful sports bettors that just use one sportsbook. Not only is using multiple sportsbooks going to get you access to more odds and markets, but you will be able to receive deposit bonuses, reload bonuses, and take advantage of odds boosts.

Having access to more odds allows you to line shop and get the best price you can on your wagers. It also allows you to utilize different types of sportsbooks, such as reduced juice, another geared towards recreational bettors, and one geared more towards professional bettors or market makers with higher limits.

This will move you past the sports betting for dummies phase and into learning sports handicapping properly, and hopefully, growing your bankroll along the way. One of the areas that sportsbooks are the weakest is proposition bets.

Props are things like, will a player score a touchdown in a game or the number of yards or catches an NFL player might have in a game. The list of propositions can get crazy when it comes to massive events like the Super Bowl, but there are props every day for just about every sport out there.

Betting limits are lower on propositions, but that is because sportsbooks are a lot less confident on their odds when it comes to props.

Like propositions, live betting is an area that sportsbooks have not fully figured out yet. There can be a lot of mistakes when it comes to live probabilities compared to pre-game markets. Like propositions, live betting or in-play betting forces oddsmakers to adapt on the fly and quickly adjust their odds to the game situations.

Understanding bankroll management and proper staking are vital to your success as a sports bettor. You should find yourself in between those numbers most of the time, with standard plays being around 2 or 2.

You can convert both positive and negative American odds to decimal odds. You'd plug your numbers in; the equation should look like the one below.

Converting decimal odds is easy. However, the formula differs depending on the value of the odds. If the decimal odds is greater than or equal to 2 American odds, you'll need to follow this formula:.

If they are greater than this value, use this formula:. We're now offering the best sports picks across every major matchup with Edge, our A.

Sports Betting system. Perfect for those looking to boost their bankroll with the help of automated picks generated with an industry-leading algorithm, this artificial intelligence prediction system provides confidence scores for every pick. The American odds are easy to read.

They come in negative and positive values. The positive value, i. Odds with a negative - in front indicate that a team has a higher chance or is favored to win.

A bookmaker employs a trader or odds compiler to set odds. These experts properly evaluate team performance based on past results, skill, and recent form. Better teams will have lower odds since they have higher chances of winning, while less powerful teams will have higher odds.

Our editorial content strives to be highly informative and educational to our audience, especially for visitors who are new or relatively new to analyzing and predicting sporting event results.

All of our content is created by informed writers with backgrounds in their subject area and reviewed for omissions or mistakes. Our editorial team is run by individuals with many years of experience in digital publishing, editorial, and content production.

Our editorial content is always marked clearly in any instances where it may be sponsored by a third party, though it is still reviewed by our staff to ensure it remains consistent with our company mission.

BY Lines. Try this betting calculator. Betting Odds Calculator. To win. Loading Winter Special Premium Football Loading Offer wall Top Picks For The Week Moneyline Pick.

Confidence Level i. The Atlanta Hawks take on the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Moneyline Pick. The Utah Jazz take on the Miami Heat at Kaseya Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Trail Blazers.

The Portland Trail Blazers take on the Memphis Grizzlies at FedExForum on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. The Denver Nuggets take on the Los Angeles Lakers at Crypto. com Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Houston Rockets take on the Phoenix Suns at Footprint Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Point Spread Pick. See Less See More. Loading DraftKings Sportsbook Banner Loading Fanduel Sportsbook Loading Winter Special Premium Basketball Loading Winter Special Premium Hockey Maple Leafs.

The New York Rangers take on the Toronto Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. The Florida Panthers take on the Edmonton Oilers at Rogers Place on Saturday, December 16th, at PM EST. The New Jersey Devils take on the Los Angeles Kings at Crypto.

com Arena on Sunday, March 3rd, at PM EST. The Edmonton Oilers take on the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Golden Knights. The Vegas Golden Knights take on the Buffalo Sabres at KeyBank Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Tampa Bay Lightning take on the Calgary Flames at Scotiabank Saddledome on Saturday, December 16th, at PM EST. The Colorado Avalanche take on the Nashville Predators at Bridgestone Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Boston Bruins take on the New York Islanders at UBS Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. The Los Angeles Kings take on the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena on Saturday, December 16th, at PM EST.

The Pittsburgh Penguins take on the Calgary Flames at Scotiabank Saddledome on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. The Minnesota Wild take on the St. Louis Blues at Enterprise Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Montreal Canadiens take on the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Red Wings. The Florida Panthers take on the Detroit Red Wings at Little Caesars Arena on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. The San Jose Sharks take on the Dallas Stars at American Airlines Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Ottawa Senators take on the Philadelphia Flyers at Wells Fargo Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST.

The Buffalo Sabres take on the Arizona Coyotes at Mullett Arena on Saturday, December 16th, at PM EST. The Vancouver Canucks take on the Anaheim Ducks at Honda Center on Sunday, March 3rd, at PM EST.

Blue Jackets. The Columbus Blue Jackets take on the Chicago Blackhawks at United Center on Saturday, March 2nd, at PM EST. Puck Line Pick. Player Prop. Connor McDavid - Total Points. Nazem Kadri - To Score a Goal.

Adrian Kempe - Total Shots on Goal. The Los Angeles Kings take on the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena, December 16th at PM EDT. Clayton Keller - Total Shots on Goal.

The Buffalo Sabres take on the Arizona Coyotes at Mullett Arena, December 16th at PM EDT. Loading BetMGM Sportsbook Banner Comments 2. Popular Latest. Not a bad article, but the numbers need to be cleaned up.

The second one is wrong I assume 2. If decimal odds are 4. And so on. Small gripe: 0. Not a big deal, just a minor technicality. Betting odds are a way of expressing the likelihood of an outcome in a gambling event. They are typically expressed as a ratio of the amount won to the amount wagered.

There are three main types of betting odds: Fractional odds: These are the most common type of betting odds in the UK and Ireland. They are expressed as a fraction, with the numerator representing the amount won and the denominator representing the amount wagered.

Decimal odds: These are the most common type of betting odds in Europe and most other parts of the world. They are expressed as a decimal number, with the amount won being equal to the amount wagered multiplied by the decimal odds.

For example, odds of 2. Sports betting has exploded in recent years, and it seems like everyone you talk to is interested in getting a bet down. After all, what do all these numbers mean?

Who is the favorite, who is the underdog? What are the best bets in sports betting, and which ones should I avoid? We will answer the above questions and provide readers new to sports betting a full breakdown of how it works.

There are a few bet types to understand before you begin betting on sports. The standard betting fee on sports betting is or 10 percent.

This is also called the juice or the vigorish. However, this is not always the case, as multiway markets may plus odds outcomes. There are many different bet types that sportsbooks offer.

We will go over them briefly, but honestly, each betting type deserves a more profound explanation but understanding different betting types is the key to gambling on sports. This allows bettors to wager if the number of points scored will go over or under a specific number.

Of course, there are many other wagers, such as parlays, teasers, futures, propositions, and more. And, most of these betting markets are available for live betting, as well. Learning how to bet on sports as in what bet pays what and the different available markets is one of the easiest aspects of wagering on sports.

Getting started in sports betting can be tricky , but there are a few tips that can immediately put you ahead of the pack when learning sports betting. Bettors have so many excellent options for wagering on sports that they can easily get thousands of dollars in free play or bonus offers when they sign up at online sports betting sites.

These bonuses come with rollovers an amount you need to bet before you can withdraw any winnings but still offer plenty of value to bettors. Bonus offers are the best way to inject your bankroll with instant cash, which is vital for bettors that are just beginning to bet on sports.

Odds boosts or promotional odds on many different events are now available every day at many major online sportsbooks. These appear every day at various sportsbooks and are an excellent way to build your bankroll.

One of the biggest mistakes new bettors make is thinking that sports betting is a get-rich-quick scheme. The reality is that it is a massive grind. Sportsbooks publish news stories about players hitting massive parlays because if all their customers keep betting parlays, they will have no trouble filling up their balance sheets with more profits.

The truth is, straight wagers have much smaller for sportsbooks compared to parlays, teasers, and many other exotics. This knowledge should be sports betting , but in fact, it seems as if bettors do the opposite.

Their betting slips are full of 10 team parlays rather than straight wagers on markets that offer value. There are no successful sports bettors that just use one sportsbook. Not only is using multiple sportsbooks going to get you access to more odds and markets, but you will be able to receive deposit bonuses, reload bonuses, and take advantage of odds boosts.

Having access to more odds allows you to line shop and get the best price you can on your wagers. It also allows you to utilize different types of sportsbooks, such as reduced juice, another geared towards recreational bettors, and one geared more towards professional bettors or market makers with higher limits.

This will move you past the sports betting for dummies phase and into learning sports handicapping properly, and hopefully, growing your bankroll along the way.

One of the areas that sportsbooks are the weakest is proposition bets. Props are things like, will a player score a touchdown in a game or the number of yards or catches an NFL player might have in a game.