With the NBA season behind us and football predictions on the air, it’s time to turn our focus to America’s favorite pastime, baseball. There are a handful of methods to make money betting the games if you can find the right spots watch the numbers.
Baseball is an intricate game that many overlook because it remains one of the very few sports without a spread. Betting cards are packed with three-digit numbers, and instead of seeing “-4” and “+2.5” we’re presented with figures like “-144” and “+108” – what’s a man to do?
Don’t back down. It is unclear how baseball developed this mysterious air, but what is perfectly evident is that the betting populace needs to get over it. Money lines are not reason for alarm, and the endless resources for statistics and trends are not entirely necessary.
Baseball is beatable for two reasons, each beautiful in its simplicity.
First, there exist sportsbooks that offer “dime lines” on baseball games, which translates to a savings of $10 per bet. Sportsbooks that carry this fabled “dime line” are willing to eat a portion of their potential profits just to keep people from retiring for the summer, confident that bettors will fail to exploit that huge edge effectively. Little do they know, we have some tricks up our sleeves, and we will explore those momentarily – but first, a little background on “dime lines.”
In spread-based sports, bettors are forced to lay juice on every play. Most people are aware that to place a straight wager on a game involving a spread, that bettor must pay a standard juice (usually “-110” or “11-to-win-10”). What many don’t realize is that to bet the money line on most spread sports – that is, to take a particular team to win the game regardless of spread – the cost to bet the favorite is often significantly more than 10 “dollars” greater than the take on the underdog.
Take, for example, a perfectly innocuous basketball game in the middle of the season – basketball is, of course, a spread-based sport. For our purposes, that showdown will be a Houston Rockets home game against the New York Knicks. The Rockets were listed as 2.5-point favorites, and to play Houston on the money line, a bettor would have had to pay 135 dollars to win 100. If that same bettor were to take the underdog Knicks, his 100-dollar wager would have only paid 115. Quick arithmetic reveals that the discrepancy between the favorite and underdog is a full 20 dollars. Conversely, a “dime line” indicates that the difference between favorite and underdog is just 10 dollars, allowing the bettor to get significantly closer to even odds with the book. This trimming of the house edge is huge, and 99% of people have no idea it exists.
The second reason to embrace the old stick-and-ball is that, in baseball, all a bettor has to do is pick a winner. Oh sure, there is a little more to it than that, but last-second free throws and the prevent defense can blow a cover, but in baseball, if a team wins, you win. Moreover, if an underdog wins, you take home bonus dough.
The next logical question becomes, “How do we pick a winner?” For the purposes of this article, we we will isolate our focus on the early and middle parts of the baseball season.
There are many that will loudly preach backing the older, reliable teams, but those raving fools will lose. Instead, the two best means to get off to a hot start are to back under-the-radar teams that finished the previous season with momentum (but may have missed the playoffs because of a poor start), and to go against well-regarded veteran teams. Crazy, right?
Perhaps these theories are not as wild as they sound. Teams like the Baltimore Orioles that played incredible baseball down the stretch are heading into 2011 brimming with confidence, knowing they can beat anyone. Even better, most bettors will look at Baltimore’s record from 2010 and assume that the O’s are a mess, when the truth is quite the opposite. This is a team focused intently on getting off to a better start and competing with the big boppers in the American League East, the very teams you should be betting against.
Baseball seasons are painfully long, with 162 games stretched over more than half a year, and not surprisingly, the older teams tend to take Spring Training a little less seriously. As a result, it takes those teams a few weeks to round into game shape, and bettors like you can make money playing against those icy cold muscles and tight ligaments. The sugary frosting on the cake is that those veteran clubs are often the largest favorites on the board because of name recognition, which means that the underdog might only need to win 40-to-45 percent of the time for you to make a profit.
So there you have it. Baseball offers the bettor superior odds in a beatable game. If that doesn’t appeal to you, go try your hand at Roulette.
