If you bet on sports, you may have resigned yourself to losing. While there are no guarantees, you may be losing more than you need to. If you pay close attention, follow sports carefully and take advantage of NBA picks, NFL picks and NCAA football picks, you can start winning and winning consistently. One of the most important changes you can make to your betting patterns is to learn how to win when you bet against the spread. Here's a quick explanation for relative newcomers who want to win consistently enough to turn a profit with betting.
What's the Point Spread?
Point spreads are a way that sports books even up the odds in uneven games and make betting more attractive. Instead of betting on the money line - a straight bet on which team will win the game - you bet on whether or not the winning team will beat the spread - a certain number of points that the winning team has to win by for a bet to pay out.
Let's say you're betting on the outcome of the BC Eagles game against the Florida State Seminoles. Your favorite NCAA football picks guru tells you that BC is 1-4 for the season while Florida is 5-1. It's a pretty sure bet that the Seminoles are going to plow through the Eagles' defense for a solid win. You could chase a long shot and place a money line bet on BC to win - with the odds against them, you could score pretty big if they pull off a miracle, but that's doubtful.
The odds makers are giving BC 27.5 points - that's a pretty hefty point spread. If you bet on the Seminoles, they'd have to pull off a 28-point win in order for you to win your bet. How do you determine whether or not this is a good bet?
In order to answer that question, you'd have to have a good grasp of what's been happening with both teams over the past several weeks - as well as their history on the field head to head. With the hundreds of NCAA football games taking place every season, it's impossible for the typical bettor to make educated guesses. That's why many of them rely on professional handicappers who provide NCAA picks - as well as NFL picks, NBA picks and picks for just about any other sports or competition you can imagine.
Betting Against the Spread
Essentially, when it comes to winning when betting against the spread, the proof is in the stats. Most teams - NCAA football, NFL football, NBA basketball or NCAA basketball - manage to cover the spread about 50 percent of the time. That's true whether the meeting is between two teams vying for the top spot or between two teams at opposite ends of the statistics tables. If you're going to win consistently when you're betting against the spread, you need to pay close attention and take advantage of insider knowledge from expert NCAA football picks.
Expert cappers have been studying the business for decades and they've each developed their own formulas for delivering expert NFL picks, NBA picks and NCAA football picks.
That doesn't mean you can't test your own acumen at determining your own picks. Watch the college football lines and NFL lines from the start of the week, and spend some time analyzing the statistics and sports news for each team.
Before you bet with real money, do a dry run for a couple of weeks to see how you do. Check your own analysis against the expert picks for a week or two and decide if you're good enough at picking wins against the spread to go it on your own. Until you've built up your confidence in your own abilities, keep your eye on the picks from the experts to keep your win percentage high.
Author Resource:
Chris Robertson is an author of Majon International, one of the world's MOST popular internet marketing companies on the web.
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