Baseball Betting – How To Bet On Baseball

Now, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: You’ve got to love the sport you’re betting on. If you don’t have a real passion for the game, then keeping up with it becomes more of a chore than something you do for fun, and even though betting CAN get you some cash, you have to approach it with a sense of fun, because you WILL take some losses from time to time, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, that’s enough to make you want to up and quit.

Luckily, baseball is not a hard game to love.

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Trivia time: Did you know that, in Japan, the term they use for baseball translates to “field ball”? In Japan, the sport has been a major source of national pride, and renaming the game is part of an effort to personalize it, to make it more like an authentic piece of Japanese culture, and less like something borrowed from the US.

But anyways, on with how to bet on baseball…

You may be happy to hear that many bookmakers rue baseball season. When taking a lot of baseball bettors, bookmakers complain that they might be lucky just to break even. Baseball is a great sport for bettors since it is so easy to handicap.

Oddly enough, baseball betting isn’t as popular as betting on say, football, simply because not everyone knows how to bet on baseball.

What you need to understand…

Money Lines

There are no point spreads in baseball. In baseball, betting odds are represented as a money line. This means that if you bet on the favorite team, you will have to bet more than one dollar in hopes of winning one dollar. When betting on the underdog, you’ll bet one dollar to win more than a dollar.

Understanding the money line is simple. Sometimes the odds will be represented as 1.50, which would be $1.50 to a dollar, other times, it will be represented as 150, without the decimal, which would still be $1.50 to the dollar. So, if you bet one dollar on the underdog, you stand to win $1.50. To win on the favorite, you’ll have to bet $1.50 to win a dollar.

Generally, bookmakers will offer wagers with a “dime line”, meaning the underdog’s money line is ten cents lower than the favorite’s. So 1.50 for the favorite would be 1.40 for the underdog. This means the favorite bettor will put up 1.50 for 1.00, while underdog bettors will put up 1.00 for 1.40. Of course, you want to look for the bookmaker who will give you the highest payout for the lowest investment.

Beyond that, it comes down to knowing all about baseball. If you’re new to the sport, talk with some veteran fans and gamers and learn all you can. A lot of what you need to know can only really be attained through experience.