Betting for beginners

I think one of the big things that attract people to online betting is a perception that betting online is easy.  There are a number of reasons betting can appear easy:

I have previously wrote about New Year’s resolutions for sports bettors.  These included betting with a real gambling strategy, getting away from emotional betting, focusing on a single sport, and figuring out what your goals are.  I also suggested you stop betting live with real money if you are not ready.  Here are some more bad habits you should consider leaving behind this year!

In a recent article , I explained exactly why statistics are important to you as a sports bettor.  When you ignore statistics, you are looking past essential data that can help you come to an informed hypothesis about an upcoming event or even an event in-play.  But that does not mean that all statistics are useful.  Some can be downright misleading.

If you are serious about making money as a sports bettor, you will need to learn how to set useful goals.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a novice is to neglect this aspect of your betting psychology.  Why?  Unhelpful goals can mislead you and cause you to make poor decisions.  They can lead to disappointment in situations where you should actually feel encouraged.  They can actually ruin you over time.

What made you decide to get into sports betting?  Maybe you became a punter because you dream of someday gambling for a living.  But probably not.  The vast majority of sports bettors online are just looking for a way to have fun and maybe make a little extra money on the side.  If you are a serious bettor hoping to someday make a living from this, you know exactly why money management is so important.  Without it, you don’t even have a chance at success.  But what if you are the casual bettor who is just playing for fun?&nbs

Following statistics may seem like a given to you if you are a sports bettor, but maybe not.  While many bettors take it for granted that they need to learn about and analyse statistics in order to succeed at betting, there are actually a surprisingly large number of articles that advise bettors to ignore statistics entirely.  Is there a foundation to the claim that stats don’t really matter?

There are perhaps several reasons why some bettors prefer to avoid statistics.  I would say that two of the three of these make some degree of sense:

If you are interested in betting on horse racing online, three terms you will hear thrown around are steamers, drifters, and sleepers.  What do these terms mean, and why is it important for you to familiarise yourself with them when you are betting on the races?

In-play betting or live betting is a major growing trend in the world of online UK sports wagering.  In-play betting is exactly what it sounds like.  It refers to wagering that takes place while an event is in progress, as opposed to a wager put down before the event begins.  If you are betting on horse racing, it is called “in-running” betting, but it is the exact same thing.  The growth of online betting sites has made it easy to wager in-play.  Mobile technology in particular has fed into the growth of this trend.  When you can bet anywhere, you can bet anyt

Most of the time when you bet on sports, you are betting on a team, player, or horse to win.  Sometimes, though, you may actually bet that a team, player, or horse won’t win.  This is known as a “lay bet.”  Lay betting is an excellent option when you know enough about an event to have an idea who will not win, but you are unable to make a solid call as to who will win.  Maybe you know that a particular participant is unlikely to win a tournament, or that a particular horse is never going to make it to the fin

When you start betting on sporting events online, you will doubtless discover there are a lot of odds comparison tools out there.  These tools usually take the form of charts which list events on one side and UK betting sites on the other.  This allows you to scan down the chart to see what prices are being offered by different bookmakers.  While these charts may list obscure events, they generally list the more popular online betting sites.