What are some effective strategies for winning at online sports betting?

When you look for sports betting information online, you find a bunch of articles about the basics, like how to read lines and where to bet. You also find a few pages about advance betting techniques and systems. But few pages are available that help you advance from the beginning to the point where you can use advanced techniques.

This page is designed to fill this gap. You’re going to learn 11 simple sports betting strategies that anyone can use. Each of these is an important step in building your overall system that can eventually produce profitable results.

Start with Small Bets

It takes a long time to learn how to beat the sportsbooks. Of course, some gamblers pick up winning strategies faster than others, but there’s a learning curve for even the best sports bettors. You only have a limited amount of money you can use to bet on sports, so don’t make the mistake of betting too much per contest when you’re learning how to win.

I started my sports betting career making bets of $22 and less. Many bets were only $5 to $11. I still make some bets as low as $11 today. It took me around 20 years of mixed results while betting part time to get to the point where I’m pretty good at it.

I used many different strategies over the years to make it easier to break even, but even with them I didn’t make any money. I just reduced how much it cost me to make bets. The main thing I did was place most of my wagers with individuals instead of bookies and sportsbooks.

This eliminated the cost of the vig, and this is a good strategy to use as long as you’re making small bets. When you don’t have to pay vig you only have to win half the time to break even. As you start making bigger bets this strategy becomes harder, because you can’t find individuals that are willing to take larger action.

When you start betting on sports, decide how much you have for a bankroll. Set this aside and don’t use it for anything other than sports betting. Divide this amount by 100, and make bets no bigger than this amount as you learn how to improve your results.

You’re going to make mistakes, and by only using a small percentage of your bankroll they won’t cost you too much. This strategy also makes sure that you can make plenty of bets before you run out of money. The longer you can stay in the game, the better your odds are of coming up with a winning system.

Make Moneyline Wagers

Most sporting events have at least two different lines. One of the lines is an against the spread bet. An against the spread bet has a point spread, where one team gets points and the other team gives points.

The other common type of betting line is a moneyline. With a moneyline wager, you just have to pick the team that wins the game to win the bet. On moneyline wagers, the amount you have to bet to win is usually different than in against the spread wagers.

Against the spread bets usually, cost 11 to 10 or 110 to 100 when you bet on either side of the game. A moneyline wager is a little different. The extra money you have to bet above what you can win on an against the spread bet is called vig, and that’s how the sportsbooks make a profit.

Moneyline wagers also have a vig, but it’s harder to see because the lines are presented in a different way. Here’s an example of a moneyline wager, and how it works.

In this game, Nebraska is playing at Penn State. The team with a plus sign, in this case Nebraska, is the underdog. The +150 means that if you bet $100 on Nebraska and they win the game you get back your $100 and win $150.

The favorite, in this case, Penn State has a minus number. This number means you have to bet that much to win $100. So you have to bet $170 for the chance to win $100 on Penn State.

When you start betting on sports it can be difficult to pick winner against the spread. The sportsbooks are good at setting lines that end up close to the final score, so it’s challenging to figure out which team is going to win with the spread.

But it’s much easier to pick the team that’s going to win the game outright. As you can see in the example, it costs more to pick the favorite, but it’s still easier to pick the winner.

You can also look for underdogs that have a decent chance to win. When you can win more than you risk you don’t have to pick as many winners to make a profit.

Understand Home Team Bias

In sports of all kinds, the home team wins more than the visiting team. The exact percentages vary from sport to sport and from season to season, but you can see it across all sports. Most people know this from watching games, but few understand how this biases the sports betting public. You need to understand what home team bias is and how it can hurt your sports betting results.

Because home teams win more often than road teams, many sports bettors give the home team too much credit when they try to determine the best bet. This is called home team bias. While you must account for the added chance to win for the home team when you’re trying to determine the best team to bet on, you can’t count the fact that they’re at home for too much.

The general betting public defiantly has a home team bias, and the sportsbooks have learned about this over the years. When they set their lines they account for general home team bias, and this is why betting on home underdogs isn’t as profitable as it used to be.

Of course, you need to be careful that you don’t go too far the other way. Some sports bettors give road teams too much credit when they try to eliminate home team bias in their betting. It’s just as costly to bet on too many road teams as it is to bet on too many home teams.

Line Shopping Is Profitable

When you only have one choice when you want to bet on a sporting event you have decide which side of the bet is most likely to win. But when you have multiple choices of where to bet you can compare the lines offered at different places.

Today you can place bets with local bookies, with sportsbooks in many cities, and with hundreds of sportsbooks online. You can use this to help you make more money over time.

You evaluate games the same way, but when you figure out which team should win you can look at several different sportsbooks to get the best line. This is true for both against the spread bets and moneyline wagers.

You don’t have to have any skill to shop for lines. It doesn’t have anything to do with your ability to handicap games, so it’s one of the things that every sports bettor should do, whether you’re a beginner or a veteran.

Don’t Bet on Your Favorite Team

The odds are good that the first bet you placed on a sporting event involved your favorite team. Many sports bettors continue betting on their favorite team because they root for the team and want to enjoy winning some money when their team wins.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s not the way to be a winning sports bettor. If you want to make money betting on sports you have to be able to look at games and teams in an unbiased way.

Instead of trying to view my favorite teams without bias, I simply stopped betting on their games. I still watch them and root for them, but I don’t even try to handicap their games.

You can bet on your favorite teams if you want to, but I recommend using a separate bankroll to do it. It’s difficult for a fan to look at their favorite team and players without bias, and this bias costs you money in the long run.

Conclusion

It’s hard for beginning sports bettors to make a profit, but with these 11 tips you can get a jump start. Dividing your bankroll up so you can bet on plenty of games helps keep you in action longer, and helps you track your results. Specialize in one area, shop for lines, learn about bias, and stop betting on your favorite teams.

When you learn and start using everything on this page your results will instantly improve. Once you’ve mastered what you learned here, continue learning and testing new things to keep improving. With constant improvement you can start turning a profit before you know it.