Sports betting offers excitement with every pitch and agony with every turnover. But for a novice gambler, understanding some of the terminology can be a barrier to getting in the game. Really, sports betting is easy, and with a little basic explanation a lot of the lexicon is easily understood. You can find basically four kinds of bets: sides, totals, futures, and props. We are going to explain all of look at these guys and a little more.
Side wagers are perhaps the most frequent sports bet. Side wagers, often known as straight wagers, are bets in which you pick a team to win. Side wagers have two variables – the pointspread and also the moneyline. The pointspread will be the range of points either added to the underdog score or subtracted from the favorite to determine whether or not the bet wins or not. The moneyline describes just how much a winning bet pays the victor.
Sports like baseball are played almost exclusively on the moneyline. In other words, the pointspread is assumed to be zero. Many sportsbooks offer a runline, where the pointspread is 1.5 runs, meaning the favorite must win by two, not just a single run. Soccer and hockey also are highly reliant on the moneyline.
Football and basketball use the pointspread to great extent. Unlike baseball, the moneyline is often fixed or only changes just a little.
Total Wagers – Other than betting on a team to win or cover the spread, you can bet on the total number of points/runs/scores in a sporting event. The sportsbook sets a totals which is just a number which they feel will generate bets over and under the total. If you bet over, you are betting that the sum of the competitors scores will be higher than the total. Nevertheless, if you bet under, you are betting fewer points are scored than the total.
Futures – Sides and totals are accessible for most conventional sporting events pitting Team A against Team B. But how does that work with golf tournaments or nascar races? Tennis matches can be bet with sides, but how about predicting a tournament champion? Or betting on the eventual super Bowl champion? Bets with more than 2 competitors are bet by futures. Each option has a moneyline associated with it to ascertain the payout – the longer the underdog the higher the return. If you can correctly pick a longshot — and win — even a small bet can pay off many times over.
Betting futures does have disadvantages. Foremost, betting a future which takes a long time to resolve causes the stake (the total amount you wagered) to be unavailable for many months. Moreover, futures usually either be longshots that pay out infrequently or favorites which have very little reward tempting you to place a large wager. We all like to have wishful thinking betting on your favorite team or players.
Props – For major sports events prop wagers tend to be available. Prop wagers are anything that doesn’t fit in to the categories above. Consider props completely fun bets – the odds are usually awful and rarely any skill goes in to the bet. The Superbowl annually has hundreds of potential prop bets between the coin flip, to whether the game ends in overtime. Inbetween you bet on the teams and individual players. For example, the number of interceptions for the quarterback or perhaps the number of rushing yards for the running back.
Live Betting – Some advanced sportsbooks are now offering live in-game betting. These are really prop bets, but since the bets have an incredibly short duration (e.g. will a first down be the result of the next play) they need their own category.
That should be all you may need to understand for bet types as it covers all of the typical bets made in a sportsbook!