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Most people who want to place bets on sports are fans to begin with. It isn’t unheard of for a gambler to place some sports bets, especially during big games like the Super Bowl or the NCAA basketball Final Four, but for the most part, sports bettors are sports fans looking to use their knowledge of a game or of a game’s players to earn a little extra cash. Being a fan of a particular sport, a team, a college or professional squad—these are all precursors to placing sports bet. Sports betting is also a way for a fan to get in on the action of the game, with something more than self-respect at stake.

All gambling is mathematics, even games of chance. If you understand the math behind the game, you understand the game and can give yourself an advantage. For many games, like penny slots or poorly placed roulette bets, are so bad that smart bettors earn their advantage by avoiding them altogether. In sports betting, the math is more complicated. Depending on your favorite sport, you may need to think about things like bye weeks, underdogs, quarterback ratings, and injuries with the same fervor other connoisseurs reserve for fancy winces.

Live In-Play football predictions, betting tips and stats (all the live in-play betting tips you need to place a bet in one place) Live predictions and in-play betting tips are very valuable especially when the game. We show Football betting odds on the Exchange in decimals. Football decimal odds are easy to understand, because they represent the payout you'll get if you win – e.g. 2.5 means you'll receive 25 for every £10 you bet, including your stake, if the bet wins. So you and your buddy go up to place your $100 bet, and you find out that the standard straight bet at any bookie pays 11/10. That means you have to bet $110 if you want to win $100. You and your buddy pay.

So how difficult is sports betting math? The math behind placing a winning bet is fairly complicated, but the way to stay ahead of the bookmaker is rather straightforward. If you collect on 52.4% of your bets, you’ll break even. We’ll have more details on that number later, including why it takes more than 50% wins to break even, but first some general knowledge about sports gambling and the numbers behind it.

Sports Betting Basics

The easiest way to demonstrate the math behind a sports bet is to make up an example. Let’s say you and your buddy walk into a casino, each with $200 burning a hole in your pocket. There’s a big game on tonight, the Cowboys and the Redskins, so you wander into the sportsbook to check up on the latest news about the game. While you’re sitting there, you see the wagering board, with some funny numbers on it. It looks like this:

• 428 Cowboys +175
• 429 Redskins -4 -200 38

Some of this is easy enough to read. The Redskins -4 means the Redskins are favored to win and must do so by at least 5 points for a bet on the ‘Skins to pay out. The next number (-200) is the moneyline, in this case the Redskins are a 2/1 favorite. The last number (38) is the total, the over/under of the expected number of points scored in the game.

More on Placing Sports Bets

Look at that over/under number, in this case 38. If you or your buddy thinks this is going to be a particularly high or low scoring game, based on your knowledge of the team’s offenses and defenses, or information about a hurt player or bad playing conditions, you can place a wager on the total of points scored.

So how is a guy supposed to know how to literally lay down a sports bet? You need to know three things:

#1 – the type of bet you want to make
#2 – the number of the corresponding team you have chosen and
#3 – the amount you wish to wager

Knowing all that beforehand gives the ticket writer the details he needs to write the ticket without having to bend over backwards to process your bet.

Tipping and Sports Betting

We haven’t even gotten to the meat of the sports math yet, and we’re already talking about tipping the staff behind the window? Yep. Here’s why.

If you place two $100 bets, and you win, you’ll collect $440. You should consider leaving a tip around five percent of your winnings. Yes, that’s a $22 tip, but you just made a huge win, and surely you can spring for a twenty-spot for the guy who helped you win it. If you tip around the five percent mark regularly, when you win, you’re way more likely to get free drinks, which is about all you’re going to get comp-wise at the sportsbook.

So, back to the basic math of sports betting. You and your buddy, after much deliberation, decide to each place a $100 bet on your favorite team. What now?

To bet on the Redskins using the point spread, your bet is called “laying the points.” For your bet to pay off, the ‘Skins have to win by five or more to cover the spread. Remember, if the ‘Skins win by exactly four, the game is a push, and both sides recoup their bet. Another alternative is called “taking the points” with the Cowboys. That means the Cowboys have to lose by three or less for your bet to win, or if the Cowboys win outright. So you and your buddy go up to place your $100 bet, and you find out that the standard straight bet at any bookie pays 11/10. That means you have to bet $110 if you want to win $100. You and your buddy pay the bookie $110 and sit down with drinks to watch your bets come in.

These are deceptively simple bets. Deceptively because they make it look like the outcome of the football game is like the outcome of picking marbles out of a bag. Put one black marble and two white marbles in a bag, pull one out at random, and there’s your football game. After all, the odds are the same: 2/1 for white.

But we, as sports fans, know that the mathematics of a sporting event is much more complex. Sports bettors deeply involved in their hobby will subscribe to weather bulletins from major cities that take part in their sport, making huge wagering decisions based on a few mph of wind in one direction or another. Then there’s the unknown—does a player get hurt in the first quarter? Does weather become a factor? Is a particular player “in the zone?”

How Do Bookies Make a Profit?

Just as we finish ruminating on the concept of the difficult math at play in the background of major sporting events, we’re going to turn right back towards the simpler side of sports betting. Bookies make a profit because of vigorish. What’s vigorish?

Look at the above example again. You and your buddy each paid $10 to the bookie to place your bet. That’s what the standard 11/10 odds in sports betting are all about. You bet the Cowboys and your buddy bet the Redskins, a total of $220 bet. The sportsbook has to pay back $210 to the winner, leaving a nice $10 profit no matter what happens on the football field. That $10 built-in profit is called the vigorish, and it’s the final monkey wrench in the gears of sports betting.

Obviously, sportsbooks are going to take more than two bets on any game, but this example is for simplicity’s sake. Looking at the total number of bets on different games over the course of a week and adjusting the moneyline and other numbers is another way the bookie makes a profit. Adjusting the odds a tiny percentage point in either direction will affect the balance of beats and make the book more likely to turn a profit no matter what.

Live Football Betting Tips

Essentially, a bookie is a person who holds on to money from bettors then pays them if they win and keeps their money if they don’t. That’s what the job is boiled down to its essence.

When a bookie sets odds for games, he will build what bookies call an “over round” into his set of odds. Another slang term used for this formula is “the juice.” For the sake of simplicity, let’s look at a boxing match where both contenders are equally talented, of equal stature, etc. Since they both have an equal chance of winning, a casual bet may be even money. You put $20 on one guy; your friend puts $20 on the other. Whichever fighter wins awards the bettor with the total of $40.

Bookies don’t offer even money like friends in a casual betting situation. In the above example, with two evenly matched boxers, a smart bookie will offer 5/6 odds for each. That way, a $10 winning bet would only return $8.30 plus your stake. What does this do for the bookmaker? He can float an equal amount of money on both fighters, winning no matter which fighter actually wins. If they take $1,000 worth of bets on one boxer and $1,000 on the other, the bookie would take in $1,000 but only have to pay out $830, for a guaranteed $170 profit regardless of the outcome.

Bookies look at the weight of their books all the time and adjust odds and other factors to make sure their books balance. Though it isn’t possible to completely balance a book, bookies that go too far out on one side run the risk of losing money, and losing money in gambling is the fastest way to find yourself in another industry. All of these factors are why bookies generally root for the underdog—too many favorites winning in a sport with a short season (such as the NFL) can cause a bookmaker to lose money, while a bunch of upsets (like you generally see in college football) is a guaranteed profit for the bookmaker.

The short answer here is that bookies making money has nothing at all to do with your betting. It is almost unheard of for a single customer to be allowed to place enough bets to sink a single book all on his own. High rollers in sports betting get special privileges in terms of their maximum bet size, but these privileges often change with the bettor’s luck—maximums get raised after the bettor sees big losses and decreased (sharply) when the bettor starts to get lucky.

In short, a sportsbook’s profits aren’t necessarily impacted directly by the way an individual bet is called. Unlike casino games or slot machines, where it’s you against the house, sports bettors fuel the bookmaker’s business and only rarely is an individual bettor betting against the bookie.

Sports Betting Odds

Remember at the beginning when we talked about the magic number necessary to guarantee a break-even week in sports betting? If you read enough about sports betting, you’ll hear this number repeated often: 52.4%. If a bettor can win 52.4% of his bets, he’ll break even. Where does that number come from?

When betting the spread, you get odds of -110. Sometimes, sportsbooks will offer a -105 line as a promotion or to welcome new business. But for the most part, if you’re betting the spread, you’re getting -110.

We draw that 52.4% break even number right out of the odds. -110 is equivalent to 11/10. That means if you bet 21 games, you’d have to win eleven of them and lose ten of them to break completely even. Even at -105, you’d still have to win an astounding 51.2% of the time just to break even.

If you don’t trust the basic math behind this break-even principle, look at another real-world example. Let’s say you get really into sports betting after your Cowboys cream the Redskins and you go home with a nice fat wallet. You then bet on the next 10 Cowboys games, winning six times and losing four times.

That 60% betting record (with the odds of -110 that is traditional for against the spread bets in football) will leave you with a profit of $160. Think about it—your $600 profit from your 6 winning bets minus the $440 you lost on losing bets leaves $160. It took you $1,100 to win $160, meaning you have to bet $6.87 to win $1 on average. So you see the small differences between a 52.4% winning rate and a 60% winning rate—inside those 7.3 percentage points lies hundreds of dollars in profit.

Now imagine instead that you lost one of those six winning bets, leaving you with a 50% betting record. You spent a total of $1,100, won $500, and lost $550. That means overall your 50% record drained your wallet by $50. That’s where the vigorish will get you. Not even winning half the time is good enough to break even in sports betting.

Professional Sports Bettors

Believe it or not, some people really do bet on sports for a living. Maybe they work part time at a sportsbook or in some other marginal job in the casino industry, but there is a group of gamblers who bet on sports for their life’s work. With all the math swirling around in our heads after the last bit of the article, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to do this for a living.

If you know that a 52.4% record will mean you break even, the simplest way to turn sports betting into a career is to bet enough so that a 53% winning record will bring in the kind of money you want to make.

Another example. After your successful Cowboys experiment, you decide to invest $10,000 in sports gambling over the first four months of the following football season. That $10,000 is set aside to win or lose in sportsbooks.

You plan on betting on 160 games during your investment period. You dream of a 55% winning record because your win-loss with a 55% winning record would give you an 88-72 record. That’s an expected profit of +8.8 units. How did we get to that number? To calculate your units, subtract the total of your losses (multiplied by 1.1 to include the vig) from your wins and you’ll get your unit profit.

Placing $460 bets on each of these games, a number pulled from some quick and dirty math about how much you could afford to bet in a single week’s NFL play without blowing your bankroll, would result in a $4,048 profit if you maintain that 55% winning record. Turning $10,000 into $14,048 in just four months is an investment return of 40.48%. I dare you to ask your bank for that kind of return on your savings account.

But that’s all assuming you can pick the winner 55% of the time. Do your research, look into the records of professional sports gamblers. 55%, while not impossible, would place you among the elite sports bettors in the country, if not the world.

Professional sports bettors have to worry about variance more than any other type of gambler. Working against the forces of variance means managing your bankroll over the course of the season to avoid the negative possibilities that could totally empty your wagering account. Professional sports bettors have the time and resources necessary to calculate these variances, and there are even a few pieces of software out there that can help you figure out your ideal bet in the face of negative variance. But the bottom line is that professional sports bettors would dream of having a 55% winning record, simply because it guarantees you’re beating the house.

Pro bettors make their money on bets that sportsbooks offer that give them even the slightest betting advantage. The key to becoming a profitable sports bettor is being able to find advantages, opportunities where the line a book is offering is vulnerable.

This is why many long-term sports bettors are math freaks. Good sports bettors understand statistics, particularly what are called inferential statistics, though any higher math will help when it comes time to place a bet.

Here is what a professional baseball bettor might do in his head. After looking over statistics from MLB (kept religiously by all sorts of bloggers, data archives, and magazines) between the years 2000-2010, he notices a particular statistic pop out. For example: when the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss, that team wins 59% of the time. Good sports bettors can do this sort of math in their head or very quickly on paper. From that bit of information comes a new betting theory—look for game situations that mirror the above example and bet on them. That means he’ll only bet games where the home team starts a left-handed pitcher the day after a loss. Does he just jump in and start betting based on this back of the napkin math? No way. More statistical analysis is required—he may find that this was a fluke for that particular decade and isn’t a trustworthy statistics, or he may find an even more advantageous bet based on his original theory.

Pro sports bettors also keep near-obsessive records of their bets. Obviously, no edge in sports betting lasts longer than a single game. Taking proper records will also help you test theories, like the above one about left-handed pitchers and losses. Without taking good records, no sports bettor’s bankroll will last very long.

What Is a Good Record for Sports Bettors

So, at the end of the day, what could you call a “good” record for a sports bettor? Most casual gamblers looking into sports betting see a pro advertising his 1100-900 record and shake their head a little. How could such an abysmal record be something to be proud of? That’s a 55% winning percentage, and it indicates to those in the know that this bettor is actually turning a profit placing bets on sports.

A good record for a sports bettor is any record equal to or larger than 52.4%, because that number or anything higher means you’re not losing money. A 53% winning record, while not impressive on paper, means you’re actually beating the sportsbook and putting money back in your pocket. Ask your friends that play the slots or play online poker how often they end up putting money back in their pocket.

A -110 wager, standard for spread bets in the NFL, gives the house a built-in advantage of 10%. It means that even if you do win, and you line up to collect your $100, some sucker behind you just spent $10 to hand the casino $100.

A good record for sports bettors is any record that ensures they at least break-even. If you bet 16 games this NFL season and you won 9 and lost 7, you probably made money. And taking money away from a casino is always something to be proud of.

Other Advanced Sports Betting Strategy Articles:
» Future Betting Strategy
» NFL Bye Week Betting Strategy
» Parlay Betting Strategy

Sports Betting Break Even Video:

In the video above I go over the break even % for sports betting, and we take a look at the difference between hitting 52% and 53%. I also quickly show the amounts of profits you can expect if you can hit 55% consistently.

Professional football is the king of pro sports in the United States. Professional football draws the largest TV audience of all pro sports in America. If that’s not proof enough, understand that NFL games also draw the biggest live audiences, and that’s saying something considering the size and fandom of NCAA football games. To top things off, pro football is the most gambled-on sport in the US. Lest you forget, the Super Bowl is by far the most exciting sports event in the USA, a marketing juggernaut, an event like no other. Clearly, Americans love pro football.

As more and more Americans discover they have the ability to place online bets, we’re getting more and more requests for information. We’ve prepared this page as a guide for our readers in the United States who’re interested in online football betting.

An FAQ for First Time Online Football Bettors

What is online football betting?

Online football betting is using the Internet to place wagers on professional football games. Online football betting differs from traditional sportsbook betting only in its use of the Internet. Substitute an online bookmaker for the guy behind the counter at a Vegas sportsbook, and you’ve got online football betting.

Isn’t it illegal to bet on football online?

This question is tricky to answer. In America, we have to deal with three layers of gaming law. The federal government has its share of laws, but most gaming regulation in America is done at the state level. To further complicate things, some local governments (county and city) have their own gaming laws in place. You can see why this question gives us a bit of a headache.

• Let’s start with federal law – is there any federal law that declares online football betting illegal? There is, but that sounds worse than it really is. The Federal Wire Act of 1961 declared wagering on sports across state lines “by wire” illegal, and the Department of Justice clarified this in 2011 to focus on Web-based sports betting exclusively. But there’s an important caveat. The US government is not in the business of arresting individuals for placing bets on sports. The Wire Act is designed to attack the operators of illegal gambling, not the participants. The federal government is not coming to your house to press charges for placing bets on the NFL.
• What about state laws? Yes, some states have banned online gambling in general, so if you place a bet on football and you live in one of those states, you’re breaking the law. The list is: Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. In those states, it is illegal to place any wager online.
• As for local laws, Ythey’re so convoluted and they change so often that it’s impossible for us to keep our finger on that particular pulse. If you’re concerned about a local gambling law, consult a lawyer in your area familiar with the gaming industry.

Where can I place a legal online football bet in America?

The US online gambling market is a complicated thing. It’s even more complex when it comes to the sports betting marketplace. That’s because the US government has an enforceable law which says, plainly, that placing sports bets across state lines using the Internet is illegal. What’s worse, this law has been on the books in some form for sixty-five years. But as we’ve already said, this law shouldn’t be a concern for you, the sports bettor. The Department of Justice is interested in big fish – lawsuits that bring down multi-million dollar operations and put the heads of these organizations in prison. They never have, and as far as we can tell never will, arrest Joe Blow for buying a $100 parlay once a week during the NFL season.

The 2006 UIGEA bill adds another wrinkle. The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act became law by being tacked onto a unanimously-approved anti-terror omnibus law. While the goal of UIGEA was to end all online gambling in America, it fell far short of that mark. The only thing that a sports bettor has to deal with in regards to UIGEA is the fact that it’s hard to send and receive money as an online gambler than it was before UIGEA passed.

We said all that to say this – so long as you’re placing sports bets with an offshore company, you’re not technically breaking the law. You’re certainly not breaking the law in any way that will attract the attention of law enforcement. That means you’re free to make an account at any online sportsbook that accepts US customers.

A Crash Course in Online Football Betting

Football Lines & Odds

The odds formats used for online bets on football are the same that are used for betting on many different sports. If you already know how to wager on basketball, baseball, or hockey games, you’ll immediately recognize the betting options available for football bets.

NFL bettors use four different types of bets on NFL games: money line, point spread, game totals, and parlays. These four bets make up the vast majority of (if not all) bets placed on professional and college football. Each of them acts a bit differently.

The Money Line

Bookmakers create the money line in the hopes of bringing in balanced bets. That is, their goal is to make both sides of the contest attractive, so that they profit regardless of how the game turns out. The money line is popular in part because it’s easy to read, and you can glean a lot of information about a game from a quick glance at a money line.

Beating the money line is as easy as picking the team that’s going to win outright. The money line is created by oddsmakers, who evaluate each team against its opponent and create a line that honors the favorite as well as the underdog. The difference in odds created by this balance of favorite and underdog is desirable for the bookmaker, but can be tough for the bettor to beat.

Here’s a totally made-up money line to use as an example:

What do we learn from these two simple lines? For starters, the Colts are identified as the favorite. How do we know that? The favorite in a money line is always marked with a “-” sign. We also know that the game is taking place in Houston – the team on the bottom is always the home team. Since the favorite is marked with a “-” symbol, the underdog must be the one marked with a “+” symbol. In other words, just from looking at the line, we know that Indianapolis is favored to head down to Houston and walk away with a road win.

What about those numbers next to the team names? Each team’s number indicates something different. For the favorite (in this case, Indianapolis), the number indicates how much you have to bet in order to win a $100 payout. For the underdog (in our example, the Texans), the number indicates the payout for a successful $100 bet. If you want to win $100 by betting on the Colts, you’ll need to drop $210. If you place a $100 bet on Houston to pull off the upset, your payout will be $170.

The Point Spread

A point spread is a different tool oddsmakers can use to create a balanced set of bets on both sides of a contest. The point spread is a number that stands for the difference in point totals between the two teams. It sounds complicated, but here’s an example of a made-up point spread to give you an idea of how it works:

College Football Betting Lines Today

We get a lot less information here than we do with the money line. In this example, we know that Denver is the favorite, because their point total is reduced by 13 to equal the Raiders’ point total. We also know that Denver is the visitor, and Oakland the home team, since the home team is always listed at the end.

In this example, the sportsbook has decided that the Broncos are going to beat home-team Oakland by 13 points. If you want to bet on Denver, the team’s final score must be 14 points or more above the Raiders’ score. If you want to be successfully on Oakland, the Raiders have to either win outright or lose by fewer than 13 points.

Game Totals

The simplest way to bet on an NFL game is to bet on the game total. Also known as “over/unders,” game totals represent the oddsmakers’ educated guess about the point total between two sides in a match. It works like this – the sportsbook will set a number (something like 40) and accept bets on both sides of that total. If you think the teams will score more, you bet the “over.” If you think the teams will score less, you bet the “under.”

Parlay Bets

Parlay bets are a popular way to bet on pro football. So popular are parlay tickets, a handful of US states now sell them as part of their state lotto system. Parlays are sometimes considered exotic wagers, in that they pay off potentially big rewards for a small investment, and the odds are often very long, depending on the size of your parlay ticket.

So what is a parlay ticket? A parlay bet is a bet placed on the outcomes of multiple games on the same day. A parlay ticket has to be made up of at least two games and generally no more than twelve on a single day of NFL play. Parlay bettors pick the size of the combo bet, and obviously the more teams you add to your ticket, the larger your potential payout. A parlay bet only pays off if all the selections on the ticket are correct.

Here’s an example pay table for a parlay card. Note how the payout increases exponentially as you add more games to your card:

How can you use this information to become a better football gambler? Smart bettors incorporate all four of these styles of bets for different situations. While we don’t recommend that novice sports bettors jump in and start wagering with parlays or other exotic bets, you’ve learned plenty about money lines, point spreads, and game totals to get out there and start placing pro football bets like a seasoned veteran.

How to Place an Online Football Bet

Placing a bet online is easier than betting in a live sportsbook. The atmosphere is much less intimidating. You can’t really make a mistake, since the bets are laid out for you. Your living room is probably more comfortable than even the fanciest sportsbook lounge, especially considering you can place an online sports bet in your underwear or from the bathtub or whatever.

Though every online sportsbook offering football bets uses a slightly different interface, the basic idea is the same. Log in to the sportsbook where you have an account. You’ll find football bets listed in a prominent location – sportsbook operators know that Americans have a lust for football betting, so they make NFL bets easy to access. Sometimes you’ll have to find NFL bets on a drop-down menu, or in a list running down one side of the screen.

Once you’ve found the football bets, you’ll find a list of available games, along with some other options. The fancier sportsbooks online have streaming game links and other ways to follow along. Regardless, you’ll see every NFL game bet available that day, which is usually most games for the week, minus a Thursday or Friday contest mid-season.

Each contest is like to have its own drop-down menu of available odds formats and bet styles. You can choose a straight-up wager, your odds format, and other options as you click through and research the game. You can easily add a game to a parlay ticket – most online sportsbooks make this option easy, since they want to encourage exotic bets. Once you’ve built your wager, it’s time to confirm it, then way for the game to play out.

Football Betting Strategy

We could write volumes on the subject of sports betting strategy. Handicapping, the act of comparing the abilities of two athletes or two teams, is an art unto itself. The world’s best bettors are constantly studying, learning new techniques, and producing new content for us to study. It’s a vast echo chamber, and there’s no way to cover it in a “crash course” format that won’t leave you wanting more.

Below you’ll find our most powerful football betting tips for newcomers. We’ve distilled thousands of words of strategy down to the five critical elements of a beginning sports betting regimen. If you follow this advice, then continue to do your own research on the subject, you’ll be a better and more confident football bettor.

1. Take advantage of football’s schedule.

The NFL’s schedule is beneficial to new bettors, because it offers an extended period of down-time between games. Sure, every now and then a team is dealt a short week. Sometimes, a team will play on Sunday night and then turn around and play again on the following Thursday. But even in those rare short week cases, bettors still have four days to do research, to handicap matchups, and to shop for the best lines before they have to decide on a wager. Some Web-based sportsbooks open their NFL lines as early as Sunday night. That means that NFL bettors can act and react at a slower pace. It also gives you time to study and adjust your strategy for new situations.

The NFL schedule benefits bettors in another important way – some game odds aren’t released until later in the week, due to an injury, a trade, or some other big shift in the team’s makeup. Even in these situations, you’re unlikely to have to make a big betting decision in a matter of hours, thanks to the stately pace of the NFL’s schedule.

2. Ignore the talking heads.

If you’re brand-new to NFL betting, you’re not likely to know much about handicapping. You probably don’t know how to compare two teams. It’s tempting, in that situation, to put ESPN on at all times, in the car, at home, even at work. ESPN delivers easy-to-digest news and opinions, and you probably already pay for ESPN. Heck, the radio station is free. We say you should probably ignore ESPN, stop watching Sportscenter, and turn all the talking heads off during the NFL season. At least while you’re betting.

Face it, these guys are there to entertain us. They’re not there to provide legitimate insight into the game. Not the kind of insight you need to actually gain an edge on the bookmaker. Remember, the bookmaker is one of the best in the world at handicapping, at comparing two teams, at predicting sports future. You’re just some guy who works in Accounting. Arming yourself with the dime-a-dozen pieces of advice that any idiot with a TV has access to is not arming yourself at all.

College Football Betting Lines

Your task is to find alternative sources of information that do a better job than ESPN, Fox Sports, and the rest. Elsewhere on this page, we identify some sources of information that will actually help you learn to out-fox the book, from time to time. One day, you’ll have a regular list of sources to trust. For now, your best bet is to do all your research on your own, stick to one or two games a week, and follow the rest of the advice in this section.

3. Bet consistently.

For your first season of online NFL bets, we recommend that you decide ahead of time how much and how often you’re going to wager during the regular season. The playoffs are a different animal altogether, and we cover that strategy elsewhere on the site. During the regular season, you’ll want to create a unit bet size, and bet consistently.

Creating a unit bet means betting the same amount on every game. Here’s how we recommend newcomers do it – take your bankroll for the season, divide it by seventeen (the number of weeks of the NFL regular season), then divide that number the total number of games you want to bet on per week. Here’s an example – let’s say you have $2,000 to wager for the coming NFL season. That gives you $117 to bet per week. Since it’s your first year betting, you should probably bet no more than two games. That leaves you with a unit bet size of $58 per game. Think of it this way – if you identify a game that you have a strong feeling about, you could always double your bet on that game and skip betting on the second game.

Why are we betting so consistently? If you’re not a professional sports handicapper, you have no business giving any weight to one bet over another. You just don’t know how to handicap games yet, at least not well enough to be deciding to bet $200 on THIS game, but only $50 on THIS one. Remember, the oddsmakers are smart, they’re good at this, and they’ve been doing it since before you were born. That’s not to say that they never make mistakes – just that you, as a novice, are unlikely to be able to find and exploit them.

4. Practice patience.

You’re not going to get rich overnight by betting on NFL games on the Internet. In fact, odds are you’ll NEVER get rich betting on NFL games on the Internet. Remember, this is supposed to be entertaining. If you learn to practice patience, you’ll enjoy sports betting more, which is really the same as winning more often. None of the tips on this list are designed to actually turn you into a person who knows more than the sportsbook. Instead, you’ll notice, they’re designed to help you enjoy yourself while you bet.

Some weeks, you may not feel strongly enough about any contest to place a bet. Other weeks, you may decide to place a double-size bet on one contest, because you’ve found a great line or have some insight into the outcome. Remember that if the odds are too long, there’s a reason for it.

The world’s best sports bettors struggle tooth and nail to achieve a win rate above 50%. If professional sports bettors only barely win more than half the time, how well do you think you’re going to do? Be realistic – be patient.

5. Use a reputable sportsbook.

Don’t sign up with the first online sportsbook you find. Don’t sign up with a sportsbook just because it offers NFL bets. Don’t sign up with a sportsbook without doing your research. Check the many online blacklists for mentions of any sportsbook you’re about to send money to. If nothing else, put the book’s name in a Web search and see what people are saying. The downside to signing up with a scam site? You could literally lose every cent you send them. Or they could refuse to pay you a legitimate win. With so many legit sportsbooks still serving the US market, and plenty of sites to find reviews and lists of scam operations, you have no excuse for signing up with a disreputable book.

Live Betting Lines

Summary

Live Sports Betting

Betting on the NFL is as American as the Second Amendment. It is part of our birthright – at least, that’s how many of us feel. Though some in the federal government have been trying to shut it down for years, and others at the level of state government are still actively pursuing its prohibition, betting on the NFL on the Internet is still legal. We’ve covered the basics of placing online NFL bets, and even outlined the legal landscape. It’s now up to you to put our advice into practice.