What is the best online Sports Betting Site?

There really is no one best online sports betting site, period. Rather, various betting sites may have their own strengths and weaknesses. One may cater to small time bets for fun while others may cater to professional gamers. Some might be more geared towards one sport than another. In order for betting to be fun and profitable, you need to sports betting websites that work for you.

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Rather than just settling on one, you’ll probably want to keep a few in your bookmarks and check them against each other when you suspect that one might be offering better odds on this game or that one than the other, but all of your favorite betting sites should meet certain criteria…

Legality
Most betting sites are legit, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t want to check the fine print. In the US, it is only legal to run a gambling operation out of Nevada. Throughout most every other country in the world, it is one hundred percent legal, but these days, there’s an internet con game born ever minute. Look for a site with a good reputation, and one that could actually be held accountable if they try to give you a raw deal, because what’s to stop some jerk from setting up a free website, taking bettor’s money, and never being heard from again? The odds of getting ripped off are slim, but they aren’t non-existent.

Options
Obviously, you’re going to want a website with a lot of options. This means a website that, well, at least covers the sports that you have an interest in, and that offers plenty of different types of wagers, at good odds (the bookmaker is always going to come out on top, but look for a site that at least gives you a fighting chance).

Community
One of the best things about developing a new interest is trading tips with fellow enthusiasts and making friends. Many online sports betting sites have community sections such as chatrooms and message boards for users to communicate.

And Finally, Design
It sounds like a trivial thing to worry about, but you want a simple, well designed site. Remember, you’re going to be making a lot of transactions on this site and visiting it quite a bit. You want a website that is easy to navigate, that isn’t loaded with a million pop up ads and flash animated pages and crazy bells and whistles.

Online Sports Betting – 7 things to know before you place your first bet

Online sports betting can be a lot of fun. If you’re lucky, you can even make some money out of it, but there are seven, key things you need to take into consideration before you get started.

1) Don’t bet what you can’t afford

The only time it’s safe to bet is when you can afford to lose the money. Betting is fun, but gambling addiction is a serious problem. Do not bet money unless you will be perfectly fine if you lose it all.

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2) Know the sport

Sports betting, oftentimes, relies heavily on the specific rules of a given game. We recommend betting on your favorite sports. Even professional gamers rarely place bets on events that don’t interest them as sports fans.

3) Expect to lose the first time out

You might experience beginners luck, but your first few bets should be seen as an educational experience. As you learn how better to play the odds, you’ll get better at knowing how to place more lucrative bets, but you won’t get that experience until you jump in.

4) It’s a game, not a job

Professional gamblers are few and far between. The healthy attitude to take towards sports betting is simply “I’m doing this for the fun of playing the odds.” Armed with this attitude, betting can be something you do for fun, to relieve stress, and not to burden yourself with more worry.

5) Know your bets

There are a few terms you should know before you get started, a quick glossary as follows…

Straight bet/Single: Betting on the winner.

Point spread: Betting on the winner, but if you bet on the favored team, they have to win by a certain amount of points over the underdog for you to win your bet, inversely, you can win if your underdog team runs a close game.

Future: If you have a good knowledge of the sport, you can make bets well in advance at the start of a season. This means that you can bet on the preferable start-of-the-season odds, rather than waiting until the winning team has become obvious (hence, less profitable odds).

Exotic: Betting on non-sports events. This could be the presidential election, the resolution to a TV show that ends on a cliffhanger, just about anything with more than one possible outcome.

6) Bookmakers make mistakes

Watch how your bet is placed. If someone makes a mistake in placing your bet (it does happen), you don’t want to lose out through no fault of your own.

7) Never borrow and never lend

Once your weekly gambling allowance is done, no more gambling. If one of your friends loses his gambling funds, no more gambling. Smart money management is the only way to facilitate healthy betting ha

Understanding Online Sports Book Odds

When you’re just getting started, sports book odds can be a little confusing. If you just want to stick to singles, or straight bets, you can usually go on instinct. If you know the home team to generally perform a lot better than the away team, that’s easy enough to predict. It gets complicated, though, when you start getting into point spreads and long shots and so on.

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So with that in mind, we’ll try to quickly sum up the basics of how sports betting bookmakers arrange their odds…

First off, understand that a bookmaker is always going to arrange the odds in his own favor. No matter how an event turns out, the bookmaker is going to make a profit. This holds true for casinos, bookmakers, and even carnival game operators. If the majority of the bettors aren’t paying, the whole industry collapses.

An example of how this is done: Say a football game takes place. The outcome will either be win lose or draw. Say the actual, real life, predicted odds are…

Home team win: Even
Draw: Two to one
Away team win: Five to one

A bookmaker will invariably reduce the odds to something like…

Home team win: Four to five
Draw: Nine to Five
Away: Four to One

So basically, no matter who wins, if the bookmaker gets just one bet on each outcome, he makes a profit. If three bettors come in, the first places four on the home team, the second places nine on a draw, and the third places four on the away team, two bettors will lose, and one will win. So say at the start of the event, the bookmaker is up seventeen bucks, and at the end, he’ll pay out anywhere from five to fourteen dollars. So as a bare minimum, he’ll make at least a three dollar profit.

This is why you have to understand that gambling is supposed to be for fun. If you always take the safest bet, you’ll probably come out on top after X number of bets, but the bookmaker’s job is not to make it easy for you. The joy of gambling is in pitting your own mind against the bookmaker’s, and the thrill of coming out on top and beating the bookmaker’s system. If sports are a competition between two teams, then sports betting is a contest of wits between a bookmaker and his bettors.