What does spread mean in betting
Things you have to consider when betting on football
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It is the year 2019, and you have finally realized that if you can apply your football prediction talents just right, you might try out yourself at professional football betting. Congratulations! The importance of this thought cannot be underestimated. Although, here is a quick note - even if you are as close to a clairvoyant as possible, in the real world, you are still likely not as good as you think you are.
So, to make sure that you don’t end up getting too cocky and start losing money left and right, here is a quick reminder: Being able to profit while betting on football involves more than just placing bets that you think will make you money. It involves understanding what the odds represent, the right timing for betting, the ability to critically analyze the games that you are betting on and finally, but most importantly, knowing when to stop.
The last part is where so many people around the world fail. Some people don’t know that when they are on a winning streak, stopping at a certain point and taking the money that you won and running with it is the best solution. Because every winning streak ends eventually, and you don’t want that happening to you, because you might end up losing everything you made. What is worse is the fact that some people end up chasing that victory that seems never to come. While chasing the wins at least might bring you some cash, the real danger is saying that “the next one is definitely going to get your winnings”.
The probability of the next one being a victory if all of the ones before were losses is low, and if you keep following those losses with losses, you are only going to end up losing a whole lot of money.
So, now that we got out the obligatory “be careful and don’t be stupid” out of the way, time to get into the real tips on how to get money out of betting on football.
What are the odds?
First things first - you need to know what the odds are and why you want to be picking those odds. There are several factors to take into account when you are trying to pick the odds, some of the most important being the timing of the bets you make. After all, odds may change over time. High stakes betting sites will often keep an eye on how many bets are placed on specific outcomes over time and which sides are favourites and many will often adjust the odds depending on the number of bets that are being made.
So for example, if Tottenham and Man City are playing and Man City is getting more people to bet on its victory than the odds are going to change, moving the odds to make them narrower over time. If you placed your bet early on with a certain amount in mind, now you will not be likely to make that amount with the odds. So you might want to go back and fix that for yourself. The odds may become wider as well, so make sure that you are keeping an eye on the changes - go back every once in a while to make sure that everything is right.
Also, just in case you need a crash course, the Odds are usually displayed either as a fraction or as a decimal. So, in certain places, you will see odds such as 2/1, while others will show the odds to be 2.00. The higher the odds are against your team, the more likely you are to end up winning a lot of cash when you bet on them, but it is also more expected of the team you are betting on to lose. So there is always pay off.
Pick value, not favourite
And talking about odds is very important. So important in fact that we need to be constantly talking about them and how they should be defining the way you bet, when you bet and why you bet. Some people think that the best way to go about betting is to go with the crowd. Always pick the favourites and bet with the majority of people, so that you can be as confident in the victory of your team as possible and many think that this is a sound strategy. And while yes, it does guarantee that you end up winning a bet most of the time, it also means that you are losing money in the long term. To put it simply, the brokers and bookmakers, when they determine the odds, make sure that the amount of money they will be getting out of the bets is enough for them to be happy.
This means that you won’t be winning money. Instead, it means that in the long term, you end up losing more than you end up winning. When the favourite bet ends up being wrong, the money that you lose is much more than the money you end up winning. Experts from Mightytips say that the success rate of favourite betting is pretty low too - not all favourites always end up winning. Which is why most of the time the better who know what they are doing end up working the numbers. While they might stick with favourite betting a significant amount of the time, almost all of them look for high odds opportunities to go off the well-trodden path. This is where they end up making the real profit. So when they see that the odds are a little higher than they should be, they go in and bet on that and expect profitable outcome. Or, when they see that the odds are showing 4/1 that the team that they know will win will lost, they end up making a bet immediately, which earns them loads of cash in one go.
Although this type of betting takes a lot of knowledge, a lot of practice and a lot of experience. If you lack in any three of those, you might end up picking bets that are sub-optimal and lose. So being careful and knowing what you are doing is the key to making successful bets, while occasionally ignoring favourites for good value is needed to make betting profitable.
Don’t listen to talking heads all the time (the band is fine)
This is probably the most important tip out there. When you are trying to do research about what to bet on, you will often end up looking at sources of information and predictions from many professionals. The thing is, these television talking heads and the internet personalities are not always right and more often than not, are simply talking to talk. These guys will do an in-depth analysis, but they won’t be making an analysis to make the game easier for you. They will do so only to make sure they have enough viewers, and more often than not these are the guys that will end up being wrong. After all, when you get paid to give “objective” opinions, it is sometimes better for the channel and the program to maybe not be as one-sided in their evaluation of the game as the actually correct prediction would require them to.
So don’t listen to them all the time. They might be a good source of information, but the more time you spend listening to them, the more likely you are to end up losing out because of them. The smart thing to do is to find out what they have to say, apply it to your own library of knowledge, see if you agree or not and then bet the way you think is right, not according to what they say is smart. This is when you will end up winning more than losing.
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