Basketball Sports Gambling Strategy
February 8th, 2010
Basketball sports gambling is a game of skill and relies on a great deal of strategy, which must be used in order to win. The challenge is to gather and analyze as much information as you can about a game, weigh the probabilities of each team winning, and subsequently compare your opinion to the odds makers. Make the right judgment and you win. To keep the sports gambling simple and fun I am only going to cover straight bets. When gambling on a basketball game, there are two ways to place a straight bet within that same game. You can either bet the line also known to as the side, or how many points will be scored in the basketball game also known as the total. The Straight Bet is betting in its most basic form, which allows you to bet at given odds, upon a winner. The Point Spread can bet on one of two selections that have been equated through the allocation of suitable points. In the Point Spread the number of allocated points are shown with a + sign for the favorable side and a – sign for the underdog. In order that the better wins, the favored team must win by more than the Point Spread. On the flip side, if a bet has been placed on the underdog, that team has to lose by less than the Point Spread for the better to win.
Example:
Detroit
-8.0
Seattle
196
In this example, Seattle is the favored team to win the basketball game by at least 8 points. The underdog team is Detroit, where the listed total for the contest is placed at 196. If you take a straight bet on Seattle, you are betting that Seattle will win by at least by 8 points. Conversely, if you bet on Detroit, you are betting that even if they do not win the game, Seattle will not win by as many as 8.0 points. Say the final score was:
Seattle 100
Detroit 98
If you bet on Seattle, you would have lost, because they did not win by at least 8 points. All of these sports gambling sites offer some sort of bonus for you to do your betting online with them. They are not the outrageous bonuses that you may hear about, but are adequate to start you out. You have to be careful about sportsbooks that offer the unbelievable bonus deals because they may not be able to stay around for the long haul. In most of the sports gambling sites, if you wagered 100 on Seattle, your loss would be 100. On the other hand, if you wagered on Detroit, you would have risked the same 110 to win 100. In other words you are laying 11 to win 10. The odds in the sportsbooks are listed in this manner: 1011. The left-hand side of the backslash is what you stand to win and the right-hand side is the number you risk losing.
In this basketball game, there was a total of 198 points scored. This exceeded the total of 196 that was predicted by the lines makers, so the game went Over. If less than 196 combined points was scored in the game, the game will have gone Under. On total points at most sportsbooks, once again, the odds are 1110.
The loser pays more than the sportsbook pays to the winner is the net profit that the sportsbook would make. This is called the juice. When looking for a sports gambling site you should look for a small juice.
A line movement in any direction indicates which team that the people are betting more on. Sports gambling sites will move the line in either direction to try and entice a bettor to bet on the side that is needed to even out the amount wagered on both sides of the game. This is way the sportsbook makes its money on the juice and do not let movements in the line influence your betting. You do not want to place your wagers with a sportsbook that does not move its line, because you would then be dealing with a sportsbook that is gambling and that is poor money management by that sportsbook. The sports gambling sites at SportsGambling4Fun.com are some of the best sports gambling sites to place a basketball bet with.