Best Time To Place Sports Bets
- How To Place A Bet
- Best Time To Place Sports Bets
- Easiest Sport To Bet On
- How To Place Bet At Sportsbook
- Place Sports Bet
- How To Place Sports Bets
By Raju Byfield June 8, 2019. The timing of when you should place your sports bets differs from sport to sport. The very best lines are often available early in NHL, NBA, and MLB. The lines for NFL games. It’s a betting trend analysis tool, and it’s an ideal solution for those who want to track sports bets and teams as investments over time. You can choose from a number of formats to display the data, and filter the results by the following criteria to show you the best teams to bet. 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.
See All Guides
Based on the size of the global sports betting market, it’s no surprise that there are tons of sites offering databases and trend analysis for sports betting. Some sites provide their raw data for free. Others charge for their databases and provide exclusive commentary and proprietary analytic tools.
By combing through past sporting events and familiarizing yourself with different trends, you can gain invaluable insight into predicting the future and become highly successful sports bettor.
What Is the Best Free Sports Stats Database?
SBD Sharp
You’ll have to excuse us for including our own product on this list, but we wouldn’t have created this tool if we didn’t think it offered massive benefits to bettors. SBD Sharp looks at sports statistics a bit differently, tracking teams over time to determine their standing value as investments and to help you predict how they’ll perform in specific scenarios.
SBD Sharp will help you identify which teams offer the greatest return on investment as moneyline, point spread, or totals bets. You can look back at each team’s past records to see how much money you could have made betting on every individual game or the season as a whole.
Sharp tells you not only which games each team has won or lost. It tells you when you would have profited betting on them, and how much you would have made. It’s a betting trend analysis tool, and it’s an ideal solution for those who want to track sports bets and teams as investments over time.
You can choose from a number of formats to display the data, and filter the results by the following criteria to show you the best teams to bet on: at home, when away, as favorite, as underdog, as home favorite, as home underdog, as road favorite, and as away favorite. Handicapping is all about finding statistics and information that tells you how a team is likely to perform in very specific situations.
Evaluating these trends over the course of a season is a great way to predict what’s likely to happen the next time your team faces similar conditions.
FiveThirtyEight
Some of the sharpest statisticians in the industry work at FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver (who has appeared on Time Magazine’s’ Top 100 Most Influential People in the World issue) started FiveThirtyEight to write on, analyze, and predict NBA games with an advanced form of statistical analysis by the name of sabermetrics. Nate Silver’s brainchild has applied world-class statistical methodology to predict the future of everything from federal elections to the winner of the Super Bowl.
Not only does FiveThirtyEight make all of their data publically available (thanks for their firm belief in transparency), but they offer a predictive model for both the NBA and the NFL. They employ two different systems: “ELO” and “CARMELO” rankings.
Nate Silver describes them as follows:
“Elo ratings are a measure of team strength based on head-to-head results, margin of victory and quality of opponent, while our CARMELO projections estimate a player’s future performance based on the trajectory of other, similar NBA players.”
Nate Silver created the CARM-Elo model with a combination of both the ELO ratings and CARMELO projections. As a forecast model, the CARM-Elo system projects results based on a team’s roster, as well as historical game results. The CARM-Elo model is predicated on over 50,000 simulations of the remainder of the season, and it takes fatigue, home courts in higher altitudes, even distance traveled to games into account. Additionally, when it comes to predicting the playoffs, the CARM-Elo model also gives a small bonus to teams with significant playoff experience.
This is a great model and one that we recommend integrating into your sports bets. Correct more often than not, it’s also free, simple, and efficient. Plus, few have ever found a way make data more aesthetically appealing and exciting than the fine folks at FiveThirtyEight.
What Is the Best Subscription-Based Sports Stats Database?
Killer Sports
Killer Sports is free (although you can purchase other people’s trends on the platform), and in our opinion, it’s one of the best available databases to sports bettors. In the past, the only people who had access to the same extensive data either worked at conglomerates like ESPN or paid thousands of dollars for programs that had to be updated every day.
Now, Killer Sports offers its patented SDQL (Sports Data Query Language) to anyone who subscribes to their services. It is undoubtedly the most comprehensive database available to the public.
What makes Killer Sports SDQL database so revolutionary? It allows users a unique opportunity to build and save their own trends, access team comparison tables, and access statistics that no other database currently offers their subscribers. The possibilities of what you can with Killer Sports data are limitless.
With their weekly reports on new emerging trends in their SDQL database, it’s impossible not to see why Killer Sports is a favorite of “sharps” everywhere.
Which Sports Stats Service Should I Choose?
If you’re just starting out, we advocate sticking with the free services. Once you start developing your identity as a sports bettor and get accustomed to the nuances of sports betting a subscription service will help you gain a valuable edge over your sportsbook.
If you have a friend who’s willing to bet on a sporting event with you, a quick conversation and a handshake is all you need to place a sports bet.
But people reading this post are interested in betting on sports with a bookmaker.
Luckily, once you know how to do it, placing a sports bet with a bookmaker isn’t hard.
This post tries to explain in detail, step by step, how to do just that.
Since this post is for beginners, I cover the following in detail:
- Choosing a bookmaker
- Choosing a sport
- Actually placing a bet
- Cashing in when you win
- Avoiding getting banned from a book
Let’s get started:
1- Decide Where to Place Your Bets
I’m writing for an audience in the United States. Some of the details about deciding where to place your bets might differ if you’re in another country.
How To Place A Bet
You basically have 3 places to choose from when placing a sports bet:
- A local bookmaker (a “bookie”)
- A professional sports book in a jurisdiction where sports betting is legal (like Las Vegas)
- An internet sports book
There’s overlap among these categories, of course.
Until recently, sports betting and bookmaking have been more or less illegal in almost every jurisdiction in the United States.
But this hasn’t stopped local bookies from taking action.
Many local bookmakers have apps that allow you to place bets with them over your smartphone.
But often, they’ll just get your bets over the phone.
If you’re looking for a local bookie, they’ll probably want a referral—someone who’ll vouch for you. This should be okay, because you want someone who’ll vouch for them, too.
Finding a local bookie isn’t hard:
Just start talking about betting on sports at your local bar. Someone there will eventually put you in touch with their bookie. It helps to be a regular.
Of course, if you live near Las Vegas, you can place a bet at any of the legal, regulated sports books in the casinos there. You must place these bets in person—not over the phone, and not on the internet.
It won’t be long before legalized, regulated sports betting becomes a thing in various jurisdictions throughout the United States. When that happens, you’ll have more options to choose from than just Las Vegas.
This is lousy news for a lot of small bookies, but it’s a double-edged sword for the sports bettor.
On one hand, you’ll be dealing with a reputable business. You’ll probably even be able to place larger bets than your local bookmaker is willing to accept.
On the other hand, in a situation like this, you’ll eventually start to see consolidation in the industry. This means less competition.
And less competition means higher prices.
Bookmakers make their money from the difference between what you risk and what they pay out when they win. Most straight bets at most books require you to risk $110 to win $100. (You can risk any amount, but that ratio remains the same. A $55 bettor stands to win $50, for example.)
Some books only ask you to risk $105 to win $100, while others ask you to risk $120 to win $100.
That extra $5, $10, or $20 represents the book’s profit margin. It’s called “vigorish” or “vig.”
As the industry starts to consolidate after legalization, you’ll see less competition and higher vigs. That’s my prediction, anyway.
Finally, you have the option of betting at an internet sports book. Most of these are offshore. Many of them don’t accept real money wagers from bettors in the United States.
But many of them do.
When you’re choosing an offshore book to do business with, pay a lot of attention to reputation.
Do some research.
Not all offshore books are honest.
Many of them pay out slow.
Some don’t pay out at all.
And since they’re unregulated by United States authorities, you have little recourse if they behave dishonestly.
2- Decide Which Sport to Bet On
You can bet on almost any sport you can imagine, but the most popular sports to bet on from the United States are the following:
- Football
- Basketball
- Baseball
- Hockey
Football, especially professional football (the NFL), is far and away the most popular of the sports you can bet on. College football is popular, too, but NFL betting dwarfs that.
Basketball is also popular.
Hockey, too.
Baseball is popular because for a good portion of the year, there’s nothing else to bet on.
You’re not limited to these sports, though, unless you’re dealing with a small bookie that only accepts action on these sports.
In fact, it’s possible to find bookies that only accept action for specific sports during specific seasons. I know at least one bookie who only accepts action on professional football games. He has another bookie to refer people who are interested in other sports, too.
With a Las Vegas sports book—or an offshore sportsbook—you can bet on almost any sport you can imagine. Some of these sports include:
- Automobile racing
- Boxing
- Entertainment
- Golf
- Horse racing
- Politics
- Soccer
The most common type of football bet or basketball bet is a “straight bet.”
To place such a bet, you risk that $110 to win $100 that we talked about earlier. You front the $110, and if you win, you get it back—along with $100 in winnings. If you won such a bet, you’d cash out for $210.
To win a straight bet, you must “cover the spread.”
This is how the book takes into account the differences between teams. They give the underdog additional points for determining who wins the bet.
The favorite is the team expected to win.
The underdog is the team expected to lose.
The point spread is supposed to make the bet a 50/50 proposition.
And if a bookmaker wins 50% of these bets, it makes a clear profit. That’s because when the book wins, it gets $110. When it loses, it only pays out $100.
You can also place “money line” bets on hockey and football. These bets don’t have a point spread. Instead, a bet on the underdog pays off more than the size of the bet, while a bet on the favorite pays off less than the size of the bet.
I’ll go into more detail about both straight bets and moneyline bets in the next section.
In baseball and hockey betting, moneyline bets are more common than straight bets.
For sports like auto racing or golf, you bet on who’s going to be the winner. The payoff is based on the likelihood that the driver or golfer will win.
Since there’s usually a large field, the payout odds for such bets are usually larger.
It wouldn’t be unusual for a bet on a car race or golf tournament to pay off at 20 to 1.
You can also usually bet on entertainment and politics. For example, most books accept bets on the Oscars or on who’s going to win the Presidential election.
You can find a huge variety of betting types for any sport.
But next, I want to talk about how to place specific bets in the real world.
3- How to Actually Place Your Bet
To place a bet on football, you’re usually going to place a straight bet. This means you’ll need to understand how to read the point spread.
The book lists the bets available on a table or chart. The favorite will have a negative number listed next to the team name.
When determining the winner of the bet, the book subtracts that number from the favorite’s score. If the favorite still wins after that, your bet pays off.
On the other hand, if you bet on the underdog, you win the bet if the favorite doesn’t cover the spread.
Each event will be listed with a number. When you place the bet, you just tell the employee at the book the number of the event and who you’re betting on.
Moneyline bets work differently.
When you see the listing for a moneyline bet, one team will have a negative number next to it. That’s the favorite.
The other team will have a positive number next to it. That’s the underdog.
When you’re betting on the favorite, the negative number is the amount you must risk to win $100.
For example, if the team is listed with a -160 next to it, you must risk $160 to win $100.
When you’re betting on the underdog, the positive number is the amount you win when you risk $100.
For example, if the team is listed with a +140 next to it, you win $140 if you risk $100.
Another common bet you can place is called an “over/under”, or a “total”, bet. This is listed as “total” on the list of available bets.
This represents a prediction for the total score for both teams added together at the end of the game.
If you bet on the over, you win if the total score is higher than the over/under.
If you bet on the under, you win if the total score is lower than the over/under.
Most baseball and hockey bets are moneyline wagers, so they work just like the moneyline wagers I explained above.
They occasionally include a run line or a puck line.
This works just like the point spread in football or basketball, but the number is almost always 1.5. You still have a moneyline in these situations, but the team also has to cover the spread to win.
You’re not limited to just those kinds of bets.
You can also place bets called “futures.” These are bets on outcomes with a longer time frame than a single game.
An example of a futures bet would be a bet on who’s going to win the World Series or the Superbowl. You could make such a bet at the beginning of the season.
You can also place bets called “parlays.” These are just bets on multiple games at the same time. You stand to win more money if all your picks are right.
But you only win a parlay if you get ALL the bets in a parlay correct.
“Proposition bets” are bets on various events that could relate to almost anything. For example, you might be able to place a bet on who’s going to be the 1st player to score during a specific game.
Placing any of these bets is as simple as communicating your preference to the appropriate person at the bookmaker.
If you’re placing the bet online, you just make your choice electronically.
One thing to keep in mind when placing sports bets, though, is this:
The point spreads and moneylines change all the time. When you place a bet, you’re placing that bet on the spread or moneyline as it stands at the time of the bet.
4- How to Cash Out Your Winnings
When you’re dealing with a neighborhood bookie, they usually pay out winnings on a specific day of the week. This is most commonly done on Tuesday of each week. Most bookies will let you keep the credit on your account, too, if you don’t want to cash out.
When you’re dealing with a physical sports book in Las Vegas or some other jurisdiction, you’ll be given a paper ticket with the details of your bet on it. You cash this in by presenting the ticket at the appropriate cashier window at the book.
If you’re not in town to collect on the bet, you can mail the ticket in. The address and instructions are printed on the back of the ticket. Winning tickets are usually valid for 4 months.
If you’ve lost your ticket, you still have options. If you’re a member of the player’s club at the casino, the book should have a record of your bet.
Each ticket also has numbers printed across the bottom of it. You should write those numbers down or take a photograph of the ticket. If you lose your ticket, you can use that as a record of the transaction and collect your winnings that way.
When you’re dealing with an online bookmaker, they’ll just credit your account with your winnings. To cash out, you must go through the cashier and request your money. They’ll most often want to pay your winnings out as a credit toward the credit card you used for deposit purposes.
If you’ve won more money than you initially deposited, they’ll have another solution for that—usually a cashier’s check delivered by courier.
Most online bookmakers offer multiple deposit and withdrawal options for you to choose from. These can be as straightforward as online wallet services modeled after Paypal.
Or they can be more involved, like getting a wire transfer or being sent a check via courier.
If you took advantage of a signup bonus at an online sportsbook, be aware that they usually have wagering requirements for you to fulfill before allowing you to cash out.
This is usually a multiple of the amount of your deposit plus the bonus.
Here’s an example:
You sign up at an online sportsbook offering a 50% signup bonus of up to $250. You deposit $500, and you claim your bonus. You now have $750 in your account to bet with.
The “rollover” requirement, or “wagering requirements,” are 5X that amount.
So before you can cash out, you must place $3750 in wagers.
Some beginners get confused about this because they can’t understand how they could possibly place that much money into action with only $750 in their account.
All your bets count toward this rollover requirement, not just the losing bets. When you win, you can place more bets with your winnings to achieve your wagering requirements.
5- How to Avoid Getting Banned or Blackballed
Most people know that casinos hate blackjack players who count cards, and the casinos are willing—even eager—to ban players using this advantage technique.
Sportsbooks are also wary of skilled bettors.
After all, their business model relies on their winning 50% or more of the time.
“Sharp” sports bettors are committed to winning often enough that they make a profit.
A sports bettor who wins 55% of his bets can have a huge return on investment, which represents a loss for the book.
Online sportsbooks are especially likely to ban you from betting with them.
But there are ways to avoid this fate:
The easiest way is to be a net loser. If you’re just betting on sports for entertainment—and most people are—you should have no problem ever being banned or blackballed from any kind of sports book.
If you’re an advantage sports bettor, you have behaviors which can increase the probability that the books will continue to welcome your action.
The 1st of these is an easy one to avoid—don’t be obvious about taking advantage of a bonus offer to give you a positive expectation. Some bettors only make bets when they’re taking advantage of a promotion of some kind. They NEVER bet on anything else.
Those bettors get banned quick.
Here’s something else to avoid:
Cashing out all your funds.
If you always leave a certain amount of money in your account, the book will feel confident that you’re going to continue to bet with them in the future.
Bettors who cash out all their funds, then later make big deposits, then win and cash out all their funds again, raise red flags in the bookmakers’ eyes.
Spread your action around, too. If you’re a winning sports bettor, you should be winning against multiple books—if you beat up on a single book all the time, they’ll notice how much of a sharp you are that much sooner.
Best Time To Place Sports Bets
Then they’ll lower the ban hammer on you.
This also enables you to put less money into action with a specific book.
It’s one thing to accept occasional $100 bets from sharps, but it’s something else to accept frequent $1000 or $5000 bets from a winning bettor.
Spreading your bets around to multiple books and keeping your bet sizes reasonable will help keep you from getting banned.
Placing unusual bets on sports that most people don’t follow is a great way to get an edge. It’s also a great way to get banned.
If those are the only kinds of bets you’re placing, you won’t last long.
Even if the book continues to accept your action, they’ll probably lower the maximum bet sizes. They’ll also stop offering you the ongoing promotions they offer other bettors.
Easiest Sport To Bet On
That’s not as bad as getting banned, but it’s bad.
One trick you can borrow from blackjack is the following form of camouflage:
Occasionally make bad bets, but not so many that they cut into your profits.
The easiest way to convince a book that you’re a recreational bettor is to always bet on your favorite team, week after week. You’ll win some of these bets, and you’ll lose some of these bets.
But if you size these bets appropriately, you’ll give the book the impression that you’re a real sports fan.
And you’ll simultaneously profit.
Conclusion
How To Place Bet At Sportsbook
Learning how to place sports bets isn’t hard.
Anyone can do it.
Place Sports Bet
Learning how to win consistently is another matter, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. Most people are happy enough being recreational gamblers anyway.
How To Place Sports Bets
If you run into any trouble following the steps above, remember that any bookmaker—even a small neighborhood bookie—is in business.
It’s in their best interest to help the customer.
In this case, you’re the customer, and most books are happy to help you figure out how to do business with them.