Sports bets always come with a risk that you will lose money. This might be fine if it is once every three or four bets you place, but when it becomes consistent losses repeatedly, it can be a massive blow to your confidence and overall mood. Nobody likes to lose money, and when you are betting on a sports game, it is very easy for a single mistake during the game to flip your chances of winning right back around. So how do you bet more effectively?
Do Your Homework
Before you make a bet, look into who is actually taking part and what the circumstances of the game are. A lot of people who bet on sports events are only really interested in the money rather than the game itself – that is absolutely fine, but it can mean that you will miss out on sports-related news that might be relevant. Did a team lose their best player due to an injury? Is there a home-field advantage? Are there new coaches or team leaders? The more you know, the better you can judge a potential winner.
This is especially important when moving to a new sport or betting outside of your own interests. Moving from baseball to football can seem like an easy transition since they are both team-based games with specific ways for scores to be gained until one side wins, but that doesn’t make them identical. The less you know about a certain game, the harder it becomes to know exactly what could go wrong.
Manage your Money
One of the most obvious pieces of advice that most people will get when they bet is “don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.” However, this doesn’t mean that you should bet the maximum within your budget all at once: it can sometimes be more effective to spread out your bets, save some of the money for another bet later on, or even just lower the amount you are spending in general.
For example, if you bet all of your money on a certain game and lose it, you don’t have any left for a follow-up game that might have a single clear winner. Blowing everything straight away can earn you a massive return if you win, but if you don’t, you are stuck without a way to take advantage of future situations.
Check Odds
Odds are an obvious detail to a lot of frequent betters, but it is also relatively easy to overlook them. You might have a bias towards a certain team or a ‘gut feeling’ that tells you to bet in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the odds entirely. In fact, checking them before you make your bet can sometimes be an incredibly important step.
Odds are generally based on the chance of each team winning, which means that a good team will have smaller payouts since they are closer to being the guaranteed winner. A brand new, up-and-coming team with no real history behind them can have lower odds, and a team that consistently loses might have extremely high winning odds. Use this as a measuring stick of how that team has performed in the past – it might help you decide how to bet.
Use Handicap Betting
A normal bet can be a binary thing: either the team that you are supporting wins or they lose. However, there are plenty of handicap betting services out there that build a proper analysis of each game and offer specific sports picks to their customers. A good example is kylecovers.com, a site that offers features like a full bankroll system, 1-on-1 support, and a massive range of sports picks for various sports. All of this can increase your wins and reduce your losses by having an expert opinion (and a great set of data) to back you up.
Taking advantage of sports picks like this might be strange to a newcomer, but it is often a great way to get an edge through entirely legal means: you are just being given the raw data on the situation and a list of picks that are statistically great as choices. Even if you aren’t a fan of looking at the numbers, it can be an invaluable resource for any bet.