Sports betting offers excitement with every pitch and agony with every turnover. But for a novice gambler, understanding several of the terminology can be a barrier to getting within the game. Really, sports betting is easy, and with just a little basic explanation most of the lexicon is conveniently understood. You can find basically four types of bets: sides, totals, futures, and props. We’re going to explain all of these and a little more.
Side wagers are perhaps the most typical sports bet. Side wagers, also referred to as straight wagers, are bets where you pick a team to win. Side wagers have two variables – the pointspread and also the moneyline. The pointspread is the number of points either added to the underdog score or subtracted from the favorite to ascertain regardless of if the bet wins or not. The moneyline describes how much a winning bet pays the victor.
Sports like baseball are played almost exclusively on the moneyline. To put it differently, the pointspread is assumed to be zero. Many sportsbooks provide a runline, where the pointspread is 1.5 runs, meaning the favorite has to win by two, not really a single run. Soccer and hockey will also be 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, her response you can bet on the total range 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. However, if you bet under, you are betting fewer points are scored than the total.
Futures – Sides and totals are readily available for most conventional sports pitting Team A against Team B. But how does that work for golf tournaments or nascar races? Tennis matches may 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 affiliated with it to ascertain the payout – the longer the underdog the greater 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. To begin with, betting a future that takes a while to resolve causes the stake (the total amount you wagered) to be unavailable for many months. Additionally, futures often either be longshots that pay out infrequently or favorites which have very little reward tempting you to place a sizable wager. All of us like to have wishful thinking betting on your favorite team or players.
Props – For major professional sports prop wagers tend to be available. Prop wagers are anything that does not fit in to the categories above. Consider props completely fun bets – the odds are generally awful and rarely any skill goes in to the bet. The Superbowl every year has hundreds of potential prop bets starting from the coin flip, to whether or not the game ends in overtime. Inbetween you bet on the teams and individual players. One example is the number of interceptions for the quarterback or even 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’ll need to learn for bet types as it covers all of the typical bets made in a sportsbook!