Basketball Betting – How To Bet On Basketball

May 30, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment 

This advice goes for betting on any sport: If you don’t like basketball, don’t bother betting on basketball games. It’s not hard to make good money betting on a sport if you know the sport well, and you can only know the sport well if you actually enjoy keeping up with it. Otherwise it can start to feel like a chore. Betting is supposed to be fun, if it wasn’t, gamers would just get second jobs.

Beyond that, one of the most important things to keep in mind when betting on basketball is to never bet against the Harlem Globetrotters.

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But seriously, it might be helpful to know that most basketball gamers tend to focus on point spread betting, rather than straight bets or proposition bets, and so on. This is simply because most bookmakers will focus specifically on point spreads. For a more in-depth explanation of point spread wagering…

For an example, we’ll say that point spread bettor puts up $110 in hopes of winning $100. The extra ten bucks is bookmaker’s “vigorish” if the bettor loses. A bettor backing the favorite team will only collect if their team wins by so many points, settled upon at the time of the wager. This gives underdog bettors a bit of an advantage, as they can win their bet even if their team loses, so long as they lose by less than X number of points.

So, say you bet on the favorite team with a wager of twenty points. If your team wins by more than twenty, you win your $100. If they win by fifteen points, you lose your $110 wager.

If you’re just starting out, there are a few things you should know…

If you live in the US, don’t bet locally

Betting online is really the only way to do this, unless you live in Las Vegas. The exact legality is a little ambiguous, but as a general rule, gambling is illegal. Online, though, you can place bets with bookmakers stationed in parts of the country or the world where operating a gambling business is completely legal.

Check out some tipster sites

Sports betting and stock trading aren’t the same thing. Betting on basketball, it is one hundred percent legal to get some good tips. These websites are usually affiliated with online bookmakers so as to lead you towards placing bets with that bookmaker, but you can (usually) expect good, unbiased advice, and when you’re starting out, you can use all the advice you can get.