The NBA may receive the most attention, even more so than the NFL and MLB. However, to bet successfully on basketball is much different than football or baseball. In this article we provide some useful tips for making the most out of your basketball bets.
Sports betting is a relatively new offering for American enthusiasts. While it has been possible to place sports bets at certain casinos and racetracks in-person for years, the ability to do so legally online is as recent as 2018. Now the leading sports in the United States will have the added tension of skin in the game for risk-savvy sports fans.
Table of Contents
Understand the Game
To bet on basketball, it certainly helps to understand the rules. Just as important, however, is to know what about basketball sets it apart from other sports. One noteworthy quality is the frequency of scoring.
Final scores of 100 – 110 are typical in an NBA game. Soccer games routinely end 0 – 1, even 0 – 0. This completely changes how one should analyze score-related bets, whether this has to do with who is scoring or how much.
Avoid Fame and Ego
There are teams which are simply more famous than others. The same goes for players. Name recognition usually leads to the crowd betting on the name they know. If this is not done wisely, it will certainly cost you your bet.
Reputation is usually earned through previous success. But a series of championships fifteen years ago is not the competition of today. Players lose their edge or retire, and new blood is brought onto the court. Assuming a famous team will do well can often be disproven by looking at their recent statistics. The same goes for famous players, as even they have bad games. In addition, no one player can carry the whole team all the time.
Spread Betting
The most common and most popular NBA bet is spread betting. With this type of bet, you are wagering on whether a team will win by a certain margin. This makes spread betting a type of handicap betting. Often you wager that one team will win by at least 6 or 8 points.
One important detail to note is that spread bets are often formatted with a ½ point, like 5.5. Because there are no half-points in basketball, this ensures that the bet has a definitive outcome one way or another.
If you are new to betting on the NBA, spread betting may be the best place to start. It allows you to predict the overall winner, or make things as complex as you want by predicting the winning margin. Spread betting will help you get into different odds notations and learn how the bookmaker thinks about sports bets. Soon you may see the game in a whole new light.
