How To Get Good At Sports Betting

This guide is aimed primarily at people who have never bet on sports before, and know very little about what’s involved. It contains all the information needed to get started, with everything explained in a manner that’s very easy to follow. Even those who already have some experience of betting on sports may find the guide useful, as it’s very comprehensive with a lot of helpful advice.

  1. Advice Betting Sport
  2. Best Way To Sports Bet
  3. How To Get Good At Betting
  4. How To Get Good At Sports Betting Tips

10 Simple Strategies for Becoming a Better Sports Bettor 1. Manage Your Bankroll and Create a Unit Size. It’s integral that, as a sports bettor, you decide how much money you’re. Understand Your Risk.

Celebrity handicapper Steve Stevens from CNBC's original series 'Money Talks' provides simple explanations of sports betting terminology and gives out his fo. Follow me on twitter - this video I go over 4 basic sports betting strategies that when implemented will make you b. Sports Betting Explained: The Basics. Benefits of Sports Betting. Sports betting is one of the more.

There are a few different parts to this guide. The first part features a number of articles that are all about the basics of sports betting. These cover topics such as the mechanics of sports betting, how to place wagers, and the roles of probability and odds. The next part contains some advice for when you first start betting, and includes some useful resources for beginners. There’s a glossary of sports betting terms, and an FAQ. Finally, there’s a collection of articles explaining all about the various types of bets and the different forms of betting.

Everything that’s included in this beginner’s guide to sports betting is listed below. If you’re a complete novice then we’d recommend reading through everything in order, but you can skip to anything that is of particular interest if you prefer. Also on this page is some additional information about some other sports betting sections on our website. These are useful if you want to expand your knowledge and improve your betting skills, and there’s some advice for betting online as well.

Sports Betting Explained: The Basics

Benefits of Sports Betting

Sports betting is one of the more popular forms of gambling, because it offers a few advantages over many of the alternatives. In this article we look at its benefits when compared to playing casino games or playing poker, and also some of the other reasons why you might want to try betting on sports.

Mechanics of Sports Betting

Before you should even consider risking your own money, you should really understand the basic mechanics of how sports betting works. This article will teach you exactly what you need to know in order to start betting your money, including the three main components that make up a sports wager.

How to Place Sports Bets

Once you know how sports betting works, you can then think about placing some bets. In this article we explain what’s involved in the process, and the various methods you can use. Telephone betting, bookmaker shops, casino sportsbooks, and online gambling sites are all covered.

Advice Betting Sport

Understanding Odds

Odds are an integral part of sports betting, so you really need to understand them. This article does exactly that by explaining what they are and how they work, as well as also looking at their different formats. There is a guide to the math involved in calculating potential payouts when figuring out your returns.

How Bookmakers Make Money

Bookmakers don’t just make money by accident. They use specific techniques to ensure that they (usually at least) make a profit from every betting market that they offer. You need to be aware of these techniques, as they are the reason why bookmakers have the advantage over their customers.

Probability and Value

The concept of value and how it relates to probability is vital knowledge if you are to stand any chance of success when betting on sports. This article explains what you need to know in detail, and will give you a fundamental understanding of what it takes to identify good betting opportunities.

Tips, Advice and Useful Resources

The next two articles contain tips for what to do, and what not to do, when you first start betting. You should follow the advice featured in these articles from the moment you start betting. It will help you get into good habits, and greatly improve your chances of making money in the long run.

Top Tips for Beginners

There is little point in trying to become an expert on sports betting as soon as you start out. It can be hard enough trying to understand how everything works. As a beginner, it’s important to focus primarily on just the basics. There are a few simple tips that are worth following though, and we’ve listed them all in this article.

MORE Mistakes to Avoid

It’s natural to make mistakes as a beginner to sports betting, and you shouldn’t worry too much if you do. They are part of the learning process. With that being said, there are a few common mistakes that are actually relatively easy to avoid. This article provides some advice on how not to fall into the same traps that so many beginners do.

We’ve also provided two additional resources which contain very useful information for beginners.

Sports Betting FAQ

There are several questions that we hear all the time from sports betting beginners looking for advice on getting started. We’ve compiled a list of the most common ones, and provided detailed answers to them in our FAQ. The following are some examples of the questions we answer.

  • What Is The Best Sport To Bet On?
  • What Is A Value Bet?
  • How Much Should I Stake?
  • Should I Pay For Tips

The answers to these questions, and more, can all be found on the following page.

Sports Betting Glossary

There are times when it can feel like sports betting has its own language, and this can make things very confusing for a beginner. Our comprehensive glossary can clear up any confusion, as it explains all the jargon and technical terms you are likely to encounter when betting on sports.

It’s not necessary to learn all the words and phrases contained in this glossary at this stage, but you might want to bookmark it to refer to any time you come across a term you don’t understand.

Types of Bets and Different Forms of Betting

Types of Bets

The following articles will teach you all about the different wagers you can place on sports events. You probably won’t want to use all of these when you first start betting, but it’s still advisable to understand all the available options and how they work.

The first of these articles contains a brief overview of each type of bet, and you should read this one as a minimum. The rest of the articles explain each bet in more detail, with working examples. You can read them now, or refer to them at a later date when you are ready to start experimenting with different wagers.

Bet Types: An Overview
Moneyline/Win Bets
Totals & Over/Under Bets
Point Spread/Handicap Bets
Futures/Outright Bets
Prop Bets/Specials
Accumulators & Multiples
Parlays
Teasers
Pleasers
If Bets & Reverse Bets
Permutation Betting

Forms of Betting

There are a few alternative forms of sports betting that provide different ways to bet on sports events. We advise familiarizing yourself with these, even if you don’t have any plans to get involved with them right now. It’s always useful to consider other ways of making money from your sports knowledge

Spread Betting
Fantasy Sports Betting

Before You Start: Information You Should Know

Sports Betting is FUN

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think that betting on sports makes watching them less enjoyable. This is perhaps because they are under the impression that it means taking things too seriously, and worrying about things like statistics and form rather than simply relaxing and watching a game.

Let us assure you that this is nonsense. You certainly can choose to take your betting seriously, and it may affect the way that you watch sports events, but it really doesn’t take the fun out of things. It’s quite the opposite in fact. In our view at least, placing wagers on events makes watching them even more enjoyable. It adds to the excitement, as it means there’s always something or someone to cheer for.

It’s not essential to learn all about the strategy involved in sports betting, and indeed the vast majority of people who bet don’t. They simply enjoy putting their sports knowledge to the test, and giving themselves the opportunity to win some money. We do recommend learning at least the basics of what to do, but they are all that’s needed if you just want to have some fun and place the occasional wagers on your favorite sports.

Sports Betting Involves RISK

As fun as sports betting can be, it’s important to recognize the fact that it does involve risk. It doesn’t matter how much you know about sports, you’re never going to be able to predict the outcome of events with 100% accuracy. Even if you mostly back big favorites, there’s still going to be the occasional upset where things don’t turn out as expected.

Risk is a part of any form of gambling, so don’t let this put you off betting on sports. It’s just that you need to be prepared for the possibility of losing money. Most people do lose money overall, and there’s a good chance that you will too. This is why you must gamble responsibly. You should set a budget to bet with, and only ever use money that you can afford to lose.

The Bookmakers CAN Be Beaten

Even though most people lose money through sports betting, this doesn’t mean that you have to. The bookmakers do have an advantage because they set the odds, but their advantage is not impossible to overcome. It’s not like playing casino games where there is a house edge that cannot be beaten. There’s still some luck involved of course, but there is no reason at all why you can’t take from the bookmakers if you know what you’re doing.

If you plan on taking your betting seriously, and are aiming to make consistent profits, then you need to go a step or two further than just understanding the basics. Success takes hard work and commitment, and there’s a lot to learn, but with enough knowledge and the right approach you can be a winner. The following two sections of our sports betting guide can help you to achieve your goals.

Sports Betting Online

The information in this beginner’s guide is all relevant regardless of how you actually choose to place your bets. The advice it contains applies regardless of whether you bet over the phone, in a bookmakers shop, or with a casino sportsbook. Seeing as the most popular way to bet these days is over the internet, however, we’ve also produced a section dedicated to betting online. Check out our page that discusses both methods.

This section covers each of the following topics, and also includes a step by step guide to joining a sports betting site and placing wagers.

  • Advantages of Betting Online
  • Choosing Where to Bet
  • Getting Started with Online Sports Betting
  • Bonuses & Rewards
  • Using Multiple Sites

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, we also recommend the top sports betting sites in several different categories. We’ll help you to find the very best sites that are the most suitable for any personal preferences or requirements you may have. Each one of our recommendations is reliable and trustworthy, so you can be sure of a safe betting experience.

Researching your sports betting picks is an essential part of a winning strategy. No matter how good you think you are, you can’t just eyeball every game and pick who you think is going to win. Even the sharpest of sports bettors use statistics and research consistently to shape their picks and their winning strategy.

If you’ve never researched a pick before, it can be pretty tough to know where to start. With so many resources and so many stats at your disposal, you may find it hard to not only find a starting point but also to find a roadmap to get from starting to finishing and making your actual pick.

In the sections below, we’re going to walk you through everything you need to know to start researching your sports betting picks. We’ll talk about the correct approach to take (most people do it incorrectly), how to get started, the resources you should be looking at, the difference between good and bad statistics, and finally some awesome tips that our expert team thinks you need to know.

Researching how to research was a genius move on your part, and we’re glad we get to share this information with you. It’s going to help you out immensely in the long run and hopefully help shape you into a more profitable sports bettor.

How to Approach Each Bet You Want to Make

We’re going to go ahead and throw you for a curveball here right off the bat. It’s our advice that the best way to approach a particular bet is not to approach a particular bet. Instead, we think you should approach particular games, research and make predictions on the flow and outcome of the game, and then look for which bets you can make.

When you try and force a particular type of bet, you miss out on other opportunities, and you can end up making predictions that aren’t what you really want to be betting. For example, if you approach an NFL game and say, “I want to make a spread bet,” you may walk yourself into trouble. What if you’re better off making a moneyline bet? Or what if there are props that you’re better off making?

Instead of deciding that you want to make a spread bet on a particular NFL game, research a particular game and see if there are any bets that you like. Then, begin your research and create a prediction of how you think the game is going to go. Include as much detail as possible so that when you’re done with your research, you almost have a script of how the game is going to go.

Then, you take that script and start looking for bets that fit it. Does a spread bet look good now based on what you came up with? Maybe you found that you’d rather bet the over/under or a particular prop bet? Maybe you found some other value that you normally wouldn’t have if you only approached the game looking for which side of the spread to bet?

While this doesn’t address the main topic of this guide, we felt it was important to discuss before we went any further as it will have an impact on where we direct you to conduct your research.

Starting Your Research


Now that we’ve talked about the way you should be approaching sports betting, we need to start talking about the type of research that you’re going to be doing. How do you go about approaching your research? While there is no right answer to this, we do have some things that our experts prefer that work well for them.

We like to start with a top-down approach. We start with the major stats and big-picture items and then slowly work our way down to the little details. For example, let’s say we’re looking at betting on an upcoming NFL game. To start, we’d look at the implications of the game and each team’s position in the league. Does this game mean anything in particular to either team? Are there any big-picture factors affecting the teams or players that you should know about? Playoff implications? Home field advantage up for grabs? Pressure on the coach from the back office to perform?

Once you get all of this information, you need to start looking at team statistics. This might be their record, offensive and defensive stats, special teams, recent point totals, coaching trends…pretty much anything that you deem important to look at. What you choose to look at will be completely up to you.

After you look at the team stats, it’s time to start looking at individual players and matchups. How has each individual player been performing lately? Who are the key matchups, and who do you think will come out on top? How will that affect the game outcome?

Once you’ve collected all of these stats and information, you can start building out your prediction of how the game will go. We recommend breaking down the game into small chunks and looking at each individually. For example, if you’re looking at an NFL game, you could break it down into quarters. Figure out what you think is going to happen in each quarter and how many points each side is going to score. The more detail you can go into here, the better.

When you complete this for all four quarters (or whatever segments you choose), you can put it all together for your total game prediction. You can then take this prediction and shop it around to see what bets you want to make. For example, maybe your prediction shows that both teams are going to start off extremely slowly. Let’s also say that it shows the underdog is going to end up winning the game.

If you only looked at your spread bet, you might just make a bet on the underdog to cover the spread. But now, you might be able to make a lot more money by betting on the underdog to win outright and also by betting on the under in the first half.

We like to take this top-down approach to our research on each game because it gives us structure. If you just start randomly looking at stats, you’re going to end up getting lost and missing things. If you start at the top, you can be sure that you’re not going to miss anything big. For example, imagine if you forget to look at the big-picture stuff, and you don’t realize that a team playing has nothing to play for. Maybe they’ve already been eliminated from the playoffs and are just trying to scrape by and finish the season. You’d feel silly if you fired a bet on them when they don’t even care about winning.

This also helps you to make sure you’re prioritizing your time properly. If you focus on too many small details and run out of time, you might end up making a bet that you regret. But if you run out of time but have looked at all the big details, you can still make a pretty educated bet. Although in that situation, the ideal thing to do would be to not bet at all, but we know some of you probably just want some action.

Resources to Look At

We’ve discussed how you approach your research, but now we want to talk about some of the different places that you can go for stats and information online. There are a lot of different options you can choose from depending on what works best for you.

First, you can go to major media sites like ESPN to get statistics. Typically, they’re going to have recent stats and possibly some calculations broken down for you. If you’re looking for anything historical past this season, though, you might be hard pressed to find a lot.

Your better bet online would be to find some sort of statistics website. These sites are not only going to have every single stat under the sun, but they’re also going to pull calculations and trends for you to look at. For example, they might have all of the pitching stats on a pitcher for every one of their starts. But they might also pull their stats on their last 10 starts, their last 3 starts, and how they’ve done matched up against the team they are about to play. These might prove valuable depending on how you go about picking your value plays.

Sometimes you are going to need to pay for these resources, and sometimes you can find them for free. If you do choose to use a free option (and even a paid option), make sure the information you are getting is accurate and up to date. There’s nothing like trying to make predictions based on bad statistics.

If you notice, up until this point, we haven’t mentioned looking at any picks or predictions on the game you’re researching. This is for a reason. We want to advise you to start off by making your own prediction. Do your own research first, come to your own conclusion, and then you can see what the other experts in the world are saying. If you start by researching other people’s picks, you’re going to get swayed away from trusting your own instincts.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a look at what the pro pickers have to say, taking their picks and using them, or including them in your sports betting strategy. But do your own research before you start looking at what other people have to say. Remember, you’re training to be the expert here, and if you constantly rely on other people’s picks and predictions, you’ll never get a chance to see how good you are.

An additional resource that you should be using for research is game footage. This includes watching the games live. You can only get so much from reading stats on paper. It’s hard to see how well a team is jiving or what sort of trends might be developing that aren’t showing up on the stats sheet. Additionally, garbage time points and stats can skew traditional statistics. If you aren’t aware of these things, you may make an improper assumption that can cost you money. Watching sports is a big part of the sports betting research process.

Since we’re sending you the way of the stats, we wanted to make sure that we covered the difference between good statistics and worthless statistics. There are also a few other important things you need to know about the numbers to make sure you’re getting the most value out of them.

First, let’s talk about the difference between good and bad statistics. Let’s look at an example to make our point, and then we can break it down. Let’s say you are betting on a baseball game. You’re given two different statistics to look at. The first statistic shows that the starting pitcher has an ERA of 2.61 in his last 4 starts against the team he is playing. The second statistic says that one team hasn’t lost a game on a Friday in September in 3 years. Which of these stats is a good stat, and which is a bad stat?

Best Way To Sports Bet

Well, the first stat is what we classify as a good stat and the second is what we call a bad stat. Here’s why. The first stat is going to have a real impact on the outcome of the game. How well the starting pitcher has done historically against a particular team is important. The second stat, though, is nothing more than a cool coincidence.

You have to be able to tell the difference between the two if you are going to succeed in sports betting. If you are constantly researching these pointless stats, you might be great for conversation, but you’re going to be a lousy sports bettor.

Additionally, make sure your stats are pulled from games that are relevant. If you’re using stats on how a player played three seasons ago or in games that were completely different from the game you’re trying to bet on, you’re just going to be shooting yourself in the foot. Use relevant stats that will help you to make a better prediction on the outcome of the game you’re betting on.

How to get good at sports betting websites

Research Tips to Get Better Results

Before we send you out to start hitting the books, we wanted to give you some tips to help you succeed. Below, you’ll find the top research tips from our experts. Utilize these along with the information we’ve already given you, and you’ll be well on your way to being a successful sports bettor.

Look Up the Game Implications

One of the biggest things that people will miss when researching games, especially later in the season, is game implications. If a team has nothing to play for, they’re less likely to give maximum effort. You can expect coaching decisions to reflect this as well, especially late in the game.

Conversely, if the team has a lot to play for, like home field advantage or trying to get into the playoffs, they’re going to play much harder. Coaching decisions will also reflect the need to win. You also won’t see star players pulled from the game to rest or be protected or anything like that.

It doesn’t take long to look these things up, or you may know them if you follow the league closely enough. Just make sure that you aren’t missing the big picture by getting too focused on smaller details.

Have a Starting Point Each Week

When you sit down to check out the full slate of games, it can be a little overwhelming. We recommend having a designated starting point each week. This could be a particular conference, a particular type of matchup, or some other reason that you want to look at a few particular games. This doesn’t have to be anything profound or even have any effect on who you choose to bet. It just should be something that gives you a little structure to know where to start so that you don’t get information overload paralysis.

For example, let’s say you like to bet college football. You know that, historically speaking, home underdogs can be a pretty good bet. So, you decide that you’re going to start your research by looking at all of the home underdog games for the week. Or maybe you are a fan of betting the SEC. So, you decide that you’re going to start your week off by looking at all of the SEC games and then look elsewhere.

This isn’t a profound way to help you make better picks. It’s simply giving structure to the process so that you don’t waste a ton of time at the beginning of your research sessions trying to figure out where to start.

How To Get Good At Betting

Validate Your Stats

You have to make sure that the stats you are gathering from your research are correct. This is one of the main reasons that we’re hesitant to trust any stat that we read in an online article unless we test it out ourselves. This is the same if you are using a stat site. Just because they have a big name or are a paid service does not mean they’re perfect. They could easily have input information wrong and be spitting out facts and figures that are not correct.

If your information gathered during your research is wrong, you can imagine that your research is probably going to be pretty ineffective. How do you go about validating this stuff? First, make sure you’re using reputable sources. Second, when you first start using a new source, double check their numbers against a secondary source that is independent of them. Don’t check a sister site of theirs that might be pulling from the same database. Check with someone who is not connected to them at all to see if the numbers match up.

How To Get Good At Sports Betting Tips

Continue doing this from time to time to make sure the numbers are correct and that they aren’t getting sloppy. Lastly, you should always give all of the stats and numbers you use the sniff test. Does the number make sense? Don’t just blindly look at all the numbers and hope that they’re right. If it says that Tom Brady has 900 yards passing per game, you know that something is probably wrong. This is why having general knowledge of the sport you’re betting is as important as pulling the stats during your research.

Be Careful of Opinion Pieces

Make sure that you understand the difference between researching cold, hard facts and reading someone’s opinion of what they think is going to happen in the game. While it’s okay to read picks and predictions, you need to make sure you’re not trusting them as facts. These are someone else’s thoughts on what is going to happen in the game. The only true things that you can trust are the numbers. Everything else becomes an opinion piece.

Don’t Be Scared of the Work

Winning at sports betting is not easy and is not as simple as some people might think that it is. It requires long hours of pouring through stats to try and find an edge. If you aren’t willing to put in that work, you shouldn’t expect to crush sports betting. It’s possible for you to pull off some wins in the short term, but you’re not going to survive long term if you aren’t okay with putting in the necessary effort to succeed.

How much time should you spend researching? It all depends on what sport you are betting, what your existing knowledge base is, and how quickly you can get through your research. The shorter answer to that question is that you should spend as long as it takes to be a winner. If that’s a few hours a week, awesome. If it takes you days to find your value and pick winners, then that’s what you need to do if you’re serious about winning.

Take Notes of Your Numbers

When you’re pouring through stats for a lot of different games and players, you need to make sure that you’re staying organized. It can be easy to research stats for one game, move on to another game, and accidentally keep using stats that you remember from the first game. No matter how sharp you are, it’s easy to get things twisted around.

Take notes if you have to. Whatever it takes to keep yourself organized, do it, because using incorrect statistics can be detrimental to your success in finding value and picking winners.

The Wrap-Up

Well, we hope we’ve provided you with all the information you need to be able to get started researching games and making great value picks. It’s ultimately going to be up to you to decide what sort of stats you look at, where you spend your time, and how dedicated you are to the process. We can only give you the tools to get the job done. It’s up to you to take those tools and use them to build your winning sports betting strategy.

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