Best Sportsbooks And Daily Fantasy Sports Sites In Your State

Sports betting is no doubt one of the most exciting ways to gamble. It gives you the chance to wager on entertaining sporting contects – both bis and small – and win money. Assuming you’re among the surging number of new bettors in the US, thought you’ll have to learn to bet on sports before you can start consistently winning.

The following guide everything you need to know to start betting, from reading odds to bet types. It also discusses some of the best online sportbooks and what makes it so great to bet on sports online.

How Does Sports Betting Work?

Sports gambling is a simple concept that involves wagering on sports outcomes. You can place sports bets with friends or visit a land-based or online sportbooks and bet against bookies. The latter is the most popular way to bet on sports because sportbooks are convenient and widely available.

A sportsbooks offers a range of bet types and betting lines on different games. You can choose from these many odds, bets, and teams when placing a sports bet. The basic premise is to select a successful outcome and win profits, rather than losing a bet and your stake.

Most bookmakers feature plenty of sports (a.k.a markets) as well. Common markets that are available at sportsbooks include :

You won’t find of these sports at every logal online sports betting site or land-based sportsbook. The manjority of these markets, thought, are available with the average bookmaker.

Sportsbooks require you to place a minimum bet to participate. If a bookmaker’s minimum wager is $10, for esxample, then you’ll need to bet at least this much. Online sports betting sites and brick-and-mortar sportsbooks also have maximum wagers too. The max bet varies greatly depending upon where you go, varying anywhere form $2.000 to 1 million dollars.

How To Read Sports Betting Odds

Bet Meaning

Sports betting odds seem like learning Greek or Chinese language at first glance. However, new sports bettors can quickly understand the subject of meaning after just a few moments. The main there types of odds include American (e.g. -125), decimal (e.g. 1,7), and fractional (e.g. 5/4). We’re going to focus on American odds in this discussion because they’re the most common at North American-facing sportsbooks.

Here’s the first thing to understand about bet meaning in American odds format :

A minus (-) sign indicates the favorite. You bet more money than you stand to win in this situation.
A plus (+) sign indicates the underdog. You stand to win more than you wages in this scenario.

Just by understanding this one aspect alone, you’ll be close to knowing how sports betting odds work. The next step in learning how to bet on sports involves winnings. Specifically, you want to know how much you stand to win based on the odds.

The following betting line provides an example of potential winnings :

Toronto Blue Jays +175 (bet $100 to win $175 in profits)
New York Yankees -255 (wages $225 to win $100 in profits)

You can of cource bet other amounts besides $100. If you wages $20 on the Blue Jays, for example, you’d stand to win $35. When you bet the same $20 on the Yankees, you would earn $8.88 if New York the game.

To recap, the main points behind betting odds include :

Plus and minus signs indicate the underdog and favorite, respectively.
The size of the odds (e.g. +200 odds = bets $100 to win $200) determine what you stand to win.

How To Bet On Sports : Types Of Bets

The sports betting world is never a dull place thanks to its variety of bet types. You can wager on everything from the final score to mascot antics. These different bets fall into specific categories, including point spreads, moneylines, totals, parlays, props, futures, and live bets.

Once you have the odds down, you shouldn’t have much trouble learning each bet type. Neverthless, the various sports bets do have intricacies and differ from each other in certain ways. For example, a point spread is going to work differently than futures bet. Assuming you’re interested in multiple wager types, then you’ll certainly want to know these differences before you bet.

Point Spread

A point spread handicap each team with a certain amount of points. Your chosen team needs to cover its assigned point spread for successful wager. Here’s an example of how a point spread works:

Miami Dolphins +6.5 (-110) – Dolphins must lose by 6 points or less (or win)
Buffalo Bills -6.5 (-110) – Bills needs to win by 7 points or more.

Both sports bets in this example pay $100 for every $110 you wager. The underdog dolphins are strating with a 6.5- point cushion, meaning they can deliver a successful bet even when losing. The favorit bills not only have to win but also win the game by a touchdown.

Moneyline

A moneyline bet is, in my ways, the simplest wager in sports betting. Moneyline bets appear in our earlier ecxamples on reading odds and how to bet on sports. Simply put, you just need to pick which team will win a game outright to win the bet.

The only difficult aspect to moneylines (a.k.a. straight bets) involves the odds. If you already read the earlier section on American odds, thought, you’ll have little trouble understanding moneyline odds.

Here’s a moneyline example from an NFL game :

Tennessee Titans -250
Houston Texans +195

You’d need to wages $250 for every $100 in winnings on the titans. You bet $100 for every $195 in winnings on the Texans.

Total (over/hunder)

A totals bet (a.k.a over/under) revolves around a game’s total points scored. Speciffically, you wages on how many points two teams will combine for. You can either bet over or under the given line.

Here’s an example of an over/under involving college football :

Florida State over 62.5 (-110)
NC State under 62.5 (-110)

If you bet the over, the two teams combined score needs to be 63 points or more for a win. When you wager the under, the team total number of points must be fewer combined points than 62.

Parlays

Most sports bets involve betting on one team or outcome. A parlay, on the other hand, calls on you to put two or more bets on the same ticket. A sports bettor can place various bet types on the ticket for parlay bets, including moneylines, points spreads, prop bets and more.

Here’s an example of a 3-leg parlay bet, taken from these games on an NFL weekend :

Kansas City Chiefs -9.5
Green Bay VS Minnesita Vikings over 51.5
Detroit Lions +185

You need to win every outcome for a winning parlay bet. A parlay functions as one bet, no matter how many individual bets are placed on the ticket. The advantage, thought is that you’ll earn a larger payout versus wagering on one team.

Same game parlays (SGP) are a relatively new wagering type in the U.S sports betting industry. An SGP allows sports bettors to combine varoius bets from the same game into a parlay. An SGP allows sports bettor to combine various bets from the same game into a parlay. An SGP often gives reduced odds, however, when compared to the odds of placing each sports bet individually.

Most sportbooks banned SGP bets until recently, and required parlays’s to be built from multiple games.

Here’s look at common parlay payouts based on the number of teams/outcomes involved :