Sports Betting Markets Explained

You can look at sports betting in two ways. One, it’s just gambling and your destined to blow your life savings chasing that next big adrenaline and dopamine hit, or you can look at it from a different angle. If you look at sports betting through the lens of an investment opportunity, you might find that with the right strategy, patience, and smart money management, there is a lot of opportunities out there to make a longterm profit without risking your house and you children’s college fund.

Before money, try investing time

Like with any markets that involve investing money, you should first take the time to get to know the plain field. Getting comfortable with the way sports betting works in different sports and different types of markets are crucial and studying and doing preparations before investing is exactly what separates investing in sports from head-on gambling. In the sections below, we will go over different types of betting markets and betting types you can get involved with. So you might wanna focus on just one or two, getting to know the ins and outs of the specific market is your only way to a profitable betting career. If you want to get additional, more specific info about the types of bets, you should definitely click here.

Wins and Moneyline Markets

The first and the most common type of betting is a Win or in other words, a Moneyline bet. It’s the same thing. In different parts of the world, they refer to the same type of pick, just using a different expression. In the U.S. they refer to picking a winner, a Moneyline bet, while the rest of the world conveniently calls it a Win bet.

With this type of a betting pick, you’re selecting a final winner of a match or a game. You always have to be careful, especially in sports like football and ice hockey, where you usually also have an option of betting on a draw as well. This decreases your odds of winning significantly since it’s not just a 50:50 chance of you winning the pick, but your odds of winning fall down to 33%. But most of the time a Win bet is picking team 1 or team 2 to win the game in regular time.

Over and Under Markets

Again depending on which side of the globe you reside on, you have different expressions for the same type of a market or a betting pick. Over and Under betting picks or sometimes called Totals as well. If it gets confusing at times, all you need to know is that your placing bets on a particular number of goals or points that will be scored at a game. As an example usual pick in a football match is a total line of 2.5 goals scored on a game. If you take the Over results like 3:0, 2:1, 1:2 and up will count as a win, while the 0:0, 1:0, 1:1 results would be good if you would take the Under.

Betting on Spread Markets

This type of wagers allows you to double down on a winning team, that in your opinion is likely to outperform the bookmaker’s expectations and therefore a win by a wide margin. On the other hand, you always can back up your claim that a team will underperform as well. The European markets are referring to this type of sports betting also as Handicap betting.

To take the football match example, if you believe that Liverpool will beat Chelsea by at least 2 goals, your wager would back up the Liverpool -1.5 pick. With this bet, you’re wagering that Liverpool will dominate in the game and that the normal win odds are not set correctly by the bookmaker in your opinion.

If on the other hand, you believe that Chelsea will lose with a minimal goal margin of a goal, draw or even win, you would back Chelsea +1.5. In that case, you’re betting that Liverpool will underperform and that Chelsea will cover the spread.

Futures and Outright Markets

If you’re tapping into this market, you’re betting on a future outcome of a winner of a league or a team or placing a wager a team winning in their conference. These types of bets are longterm bets and you usually have to wait a whole season for their outcome. When the season or the part of the regular season is finished, that’s when your wager would get graded a win or a loss.

In the case of most sports, the outcome of betting on the champion would take 8-9 months. The advantage here is you’re good at predicting things in the longterm the profit is way larger than in normal betting markets. If you’re putting good size bets to work combined with large odds, the payouts can be quite substantial here.

Props and Specials Markets

If you consider yourself being an expert in particular sports and being good at predicting specifics, for example, the number of cards, corners, goals or points per player, etc., then this is the market for you. You have almost unlimited opportunities on what to bet on, but they almost always vary from sport to sport.

For example, the basketball markets are usually more focused on player stats like points scored per player, number of assists and rebounds on a single game. NFL prop bets can vary from yards rushed to the number of turnovers per player and so on. These markets are usually overtaken by recreational bettors while they’re watching the game, so it is advised to be smart with your selections here.

Inplay Markets

With the rise of live streaming and technology, this market is one the rise to become one of the biggest in the sports betting industry. As you can bet on all of the markets mentioned above, it’s again mostly dominated by recreational bettors, while watching the games. The odds are constantly changing according to the situations in the game, so if you believe one team is likely to make a comeback in the game, the payouts here can be quiet substantial as well. We wouldn’t advise this type of market to be your primary focus, as yes unpredictability can turn in your favor, but it can also blow up in your face and destroy your bankroll considerately, if not careful.