Betting guide

When you are handicapping a football tournament, there are going to be a lot of major changes from start to finish for all of the teams and players.  At the start of the tournament, you are not going to have a lot of information to handicap with, but as a tournament unfolds, you will learn a lot from watching the teams compete.  That means you will want to make smart adjustments as you go along. 

Here are some factors to look out for:

Sunday 7th February 2016 saw the clash of the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers in the 50^th Super Bowl game.  Much to the surprise of just about everyone, the Broncos won.

The odds in Vegas favoured the Panthers by a fairly narrow margin—around 4 points when I last looked.  One Associated Press sports journalist predicted the Panthers would beat the Broncos 31-18.  Many pundits thought that the lead would be a lot bigger than that—30 or more points.

If you are serious about betting on sports, and are thinking about turning it into a full-time job, you may think that you're getting away from the stress associated with a 9-to-5 job. While this may ultimately be true, it is not an easy or fast transition to make. In fact, in some ways it can be even more stressful, especially while you are still balancing betting with a day job. See Sources of Stress in Betting Part 1 for a brief introduction to this topic.

Thinking of wagering on the European tour or another golf tournament?  Betting on golf adds an extra dimension of excitement to the sport, and it can also be very profitable if you win on a long-shot.  What types of wagers can you place?  While there are many different types of golf bets, here are the most common ones:

If you are handicapping american football, one of the statistics you might look at is the quarterback rating. There are actually two quarterback ratings which are widely used, the NFL quarterback rating and the ESPN’s Total Quarterback Rating, or QBR.  The NFL quarterback rating has been around much longer.  While it is less comprehensive than the QBR, it does still offer value to bettors.  The correlation between the NFL quarterback rating differential and the success of the quarterback is quite strong. 

If you are a die-hard football fan and you bet through the entire season, you probably have a pretty good idea what you are doing, even if you are just starting out.  But if you are the casual football fan who just wants to take a shot at betting on the World Cup or one of the other major tournaments, you will want to steer clear of some common newbie mistakes.

1. Putting too much emphasis on public hype

While handicapping football is the art of predicting results accurately enough to wager on them and win, now and again something happens that hardly anyone predicts.  If you’ve recently bet on a favourite only to lose all your money in a shocking defeat against a team that seemed to have no chance, you need to figure out what it means before you bet again. 

Planning on betting on one of the big international football tournaments?  If so, good for you!  The World Cup, European Championship, Confederations Cup, and other international events are some of the most exciting spectacles in all of sports.  Betting on them can be an amazing experience, and a lucrative one too if you do it right.  Part of that is managing your bankroll intelligently, and that starts with some basic planning at the beginning of the tournament.

In past years, the Super Bowl was a big deal mainly in the USA, but recently it has become a global phenomenon.

We’re less than a couple of days away now from Super Bowl 50.  With the game being broadcast to 230 countries, this is the biggest year ever for NFL around the world—including in the UK.