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Every sports bettor looks for tips and tricks to help them win more.
I’ve compiled a list of 9 great sports betting tactics to help you start your own “winning-life-crazy” systems.
1 – Home Teams Win More than They Lose
You can’t bet on home teams every time and hope to win more money than you lose.
But it’s a great place to start handicapping games.
I always start looking at the home teams to get a group of games I want to consider placing bets on. Then I look at other factors to see if the home team offers value at the current line.
Knowing the overall winning percentage of home teams in the sport helps me find value.
2 – The Money Line Can Be Your Friend
The money line is a bet on who is going to win a game heads up. You don’t have to beat a point spread. It’s often easy to pick a winner, especially when a powerful team is playing a weak team.
The sports books charge a premium on money line wagers.
But they can still offer smart sports bettor’s value.
Don’t just focus only on the point spreads of games. Start considering the money lines too. Start picking money line games when you place point spread wagers to see how you do.
Do this on paper for a while to see if it’s a profitable way to add to your existing sports betting action.
3 – College Sports Offer Weaker Lines than Pro Sports
One of the biggest secrets of professional sports bettors is that college lines are weaker than professional sports lines. More college games happen each week than pro games. Less money is wagered on most college games than pro games.
As a result, the books invest less time in getting the lines exactly right, but it doesn’t matter why college sports offer weaker lines. The important thing is taking advantage of them.
Focus on schools in the smaller and mid-sized conferences, especially in football and basketball. It takes less work to learn more about these teams than the sports books.
Are you willing to put in the work?
If you are, then you will quickly start seeing profitable betting lines.
4 – Home Underdogs Often Offer Value
For years you could blindly bet home underdogs and have a great chance to win. The sports books figured this out, though. Now they have started adjusting lines to cover this loop hole.
But sharp sports bettors know that many home underdogs still offer good value.
This tactic is closely related to tactic #1. But it gets its own discussion because it’s a great place for beginning sports bettors to start tracking results.
Want to know how to get started taking advantage of this?
Build a spreadsheet. Enter every home underdog spread and money line and the results of each game.
Track the results for several weeks. You’ll start seeing patterns that offer winning betting opportunities.
Many bettors get stuck concentrating on point spreads.
But the money line can be a source of crazy profits.
5 – Injuries and Fatigue Mean More than Some Stats
This usually matters late in the NFL or MLB season. Running backs with a lot of carries or pitchers with a lot of innings pitched can start to tire and put up worse results.
You can also find opportunities earlier in the baseball season if a pitcher has a high pitch count in a previous start.
Fatigue can be tricky. I always watch for signs of it with pitchers after they have starts with higher than normal pitch counts. I don’t have enough statistical evidence to guarantee this. But it often shows up two or three starts after the high pitch count, not the very next start.
6 – Playing the Middle
Sometimes you can find betting lines at two different sports books and / or times that allow you to place a pair of bets with a chance to win both.
Here’s an example:
You place a bet on an NFL game on the home team and give 3 ½ points. A couple days later the line shifts. You place a bet on the visiting team in the same game and get 4 ½ points.
If the home team wins by exactly 4 points you win both sides of the bet.
This can also happen when you place bets at two different sports books. Sometimes they have different lines.
This sounds like a perfect situation.
But it’s not a free ride.
Everything’s great when the final score is perfect for you. But every other time you win one game and lose the other.
This would be fine except for the vig. If you bet 110 to win 100 on each side, you lose 10 every time the score doesn’t let you win both sides.
What’s the bottom line?
You need to win at least once out of every 20 times to profit long term in these situations.
Here’s the math:
When you win both sides, your profit is 200.
Every time you don’t win both sides you lose 10.
Losing 19 times is a total loss of 190.
So you have to win one out of 20 or better.
What’s great about situations?
The books are good at setting lines. They aren’t perfect. But they’ll usually be close enough to make middle bets worth considering.
7 – Long Term Winners Develop Systems
Do you want to develop a consistent winning strategy for sports betting?
You need to move beyond looking at individual games and picking the team you think will win.
You need to develop systems that help you find games that offer value.
Start collecting statistics and game information as soon as possible. Find possible trends. Test those trends.
Once you find trends that are real, you can build systems around them to increase your chances of winning like crazy.
8 – Bankroll Management as a Betting Strategy
Bankroll management doesn’t really count as a strategy.
But without it, no strategy can save you.
Here’s why:
Smart sports bettors understand they will lose a percentage of games. That’s why they only risk a percentage of their total bankroll on any single event.
They also understand that no matter how good they are at picking winners, they will go through losing streaks.
If you’re broke, it doesn’t matter how good you are at picking winners.
You must protect your bankroll at all costs.
9 – Double Your Bets
One of the oldest gambling systems is where you double your bets after a loss. You make up for your previous losses, and you show a small profit after that subsequent win.
In most gambling activities, this will work for a while.
But eventually you’ll hit a long enough losing streak that destroys your bankroll. Or you reach a point where you can’t place bets large enough to make up for your previous losses.
This system doesn’t work in the long run for situations where the outcomes are close to 50 / 50.
But sports betting often offers situations where the odds of something happening are much higher than 50%.
Want an example?
Money line bets on college football games when a major team is playing an early season small school team create a situation where the favorite will win much more than 50% of the time.
Some of these games offer situations that happen over 95% of the time.
If you look at these kinds of games you can quickly find situations where you might be able to use this strategy.
Be warned though; doubling your bets, even on a strong favorite, can be devastating if you hit a cold streak.
Conclusion
Winning like crazy as a sports bettor is hard, but if you put in the work, you have a great chance to show a long term profit. Use the tactics listed above to start building your own bag of tricks.
