The fall months are the most exciting time to be a sports bettor! Hockey and basketball are ramping up, football teams are marching across the gridiron, and baseball’s World Series typically takes place in the final weeks of October and early November. It’s only natural that sports fans would want to channel their passion and zeal into a wager to feel part of the game.
But making betting decisions can get tricky. There’s no shortage of pundits weighing in on which teams, players, and leagues are worth following and betting on. Add in your own personal favourites and it’s easy to be pulled in all sorts of directions when sitting down to make your Proline+ picks.
So let’s get into some tips and strategies on how bettors can navigate this exhilarating time of year.
Pick a sport, any sport
A good starting point for keeping your sports betting fun and friendly is to keep it to a single sport. This helps reduce the stress that can come with trying to keep tabs on every game that scrolls past on TSN’s sports ticker. Plus, it makes it easier to keep track of how much you’re betting.
Picking a single sport also lets you focus on getting to know that sport and its players even better, which can only help when picking your bets and making informed decisions on long-term wagers that involve choosing season or tournament champions.
Beware of bias
Talking heads on TV and social media all have something to say about who they like and why. The better ones will back up their hot takes with facts and figures. But their opinions are still just that: their own personal view.
Sports experts may seem confident when they talk about why a player is overdue for a win or how one team’s lineup trumps another’s, but remember: everyone has their own perspectives. So, let the commentators hype you up for the game and just enjoy the ride.
You aren’t immune to bias, either! Hometown loyalty, someone who plays your position, teams decked out in eye-catching duds…these are just some of the factors that can draw us to root for particular teams and players whether it makes sense or not.
Cheering on your personal favourites through thick and thin is fun. Letting your own partiality govern a big bet? Probably not the best idea.
Sportsbooks know what they’re doing
When it comes down to it, the best indicator of how a team or player is going to perform is a respected sportsbook.
Sportsbooks employ professional number crunchers who spend their days working out the odds of all sorts of stuff happening in games, from whether the Maple Leafs are going to score a goal in the third period against bitter rivals the Ottawa Senators, to which team is most likely to win the Stanley Cup at any given moment.
All of that said, anything can and often does happen in sports! The Miracle on Ice in 1980, Argentina beating the U.S. dream team in Olympic basketball in 2004, a seemingly washed-up Tiger Woods coming from behind to win the 2019 Masters—there’s no telling what can or will happen until the game is over. Every bet is a risk.
So what’s the best strategy?
Knowledge is your friend. Take a cue from the bookmakers and do your research. Learn the rules of your favourite sports inside and out, and take time to get to know which stats are most likely to provide clues to competition outcomes. Study teams and players and try to spot trends on how they might perform over the short and long terms.
Next, get to know the markets you’ve chosen to play in. Learn what an over/under is, how moneyline works, the meaning of point spreads, and what a prop bet is.
It’s also important to understand the odds. Decimal odds, for example, make it pretty easy to calculate your potential winnings. Just multiply the amount you’re betting by the posted odds. If a team’s odds are listed at 1.5, then a winning $10 bet would return $15. The higher the number, the riskier the bet. Just remember that while odds are a useful guide, anything can happen on game day!
Once you feel confident, create a sports spend limit you can afford, make sure you stick to it (My PlaySmart offers tools that can help with this), and place your first bet, knowing you have a play strategy designed to maximize entertainment and minimize risk.
But the most important strategy of all is simply this: Don’t get so caught up in the excitement that you go overboard. Know your sport, do the math on each bet you make, and keep it fun.
