Thursday, January 20, 2011 | | By: Carmen

How to make the most of spread betting on sports

Spread betting is used mostly either in sports or in the stock market, and while it is a complicated method of gambling at the best of times, the simpler of the two is sports spread betting. The reason people deal with spread bets on sports games and events is mostly that traditional bets like this team loses and that team wins can be boring and often fairly obvious given team rankings.

What do you do when a major league team is pitted against a low ranking wildcard team? The obvious choice is that the former will win, but if everybody bets that way then the fun is gone and the profits are pretty much sunk for all the winners. To alleviate the tedium of such situations, the spread bet has taken over bookmaker's lounges.



What is a spread bet?

In simple terms spread betting is focused on the difference in points between the winning and the losing team in any sport. If you bet that Team A wins over Team B, you are actually taking the odds from the bookmaker and stating that the first team will win by a certain number of points. This difference in point totals is the 'spread', and the closer you are to the exact point spread the more money you will win. What determines the spread bet are the odds, given by your bookmaker. The bookmaker decides what the spread will be and you must work within those limits to determine your own bet.

If the bookmaker gives the spread as 4, and you bet on the underdog, you are basically betting that your team will have a point total that, when added to 4, is more that the other team. With this method, it doesn't matter if the team you bet on doesn't actually win, because the spread is always included in their score. The reverse is true if you bet on the favoured team. If you place your bet on the team that was given the bets odds of winning, you will only win if their score minus the spread (4) is still more than the other team. This is called either taking or giving the spread, respectively.

Another part of sports betting is the ability to bet on specifics - you can secure your point spread as being the final score, or the score after a particular inning, quarter or half of the game. Some bookmakers will let you include amendments to the bet like a certain player will go out early or the losing team will go on to win at national level.

The point of the spread bet is just to add some intrigue to the game when a simple win/lose/draw bet is too boring to even consider. Apart from this, you also stand to lose and gain a lot more money than you can with traditional bets. So beware! It's more exciting, but you'd better have the money to back it up!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Those who are really into sports betting will surely benefit from this post. It was really informative and I find it very interesting.

sports betting advice

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