Sports Betting School – Tutorial One of Six
The world of football betting is big and growing ever bigger. There are now more opportunities to have a bet than ever before. Backing your judgement and enjoying the thrill of a bet – especially a winning one – offers great excitement, but it can be confusing for the first-time punter.
This tutorial is designed to explain some of the most basic and popular football betting opportunities and to help identify what prices are being offered and how to place a bet. So to start at the beginning, you have registered on the site and deposited funds and two teams are playing in a match that has caught your interest – in this example it is a Premier League game between Portsmouth and West Ham.
You have assessed the team strengths, perhaps looked at recent results, league positions and even head-to-head records (Topleague provides all this information plus a great preview podcast), you have formed an opinion and are ready to back your judgement.
The most straightforward option is to select the game from the Premier League coupon and to have a ‘match bet’, that is to choose the outcome of a game for which there are three alternatives: home win (also noted as 1 on the coupon), a draw (noted as X) and an away win (noted as 2). This system is known Europe-wide as 1X2 and is different to an Asian Handicap which will be explained in a later tutorial The prices on offer for this game, derived by Betsson’s own experts (odds compilers) are:
Portsmouth 2.50 (stake 1 unit, return 2.50 units including stake)
Draw 3.10 (stake 1 unit, return 3.10 units including stake)
West Ham 2.80 (stake 1 unit, return 2.80 units including stake)
These prices are expressed as decimal odds, but they can also be displayed as fractional odds (particularly in the UK) which provide the same returns and for this match would read thus:
Portsmouth 6/4
Draw 21/10
West Ham 9/5
It is now a simple matter of choosing the outcome you predict will happen and the level of stake you wish to invest – then sit back and enjoy the game. If there are a number of games of interest you can link them together in ‘a multiple’ and potentially win big from a small stake – at Betsson you can bet as low as 1 tenth of the unit currency – that is if you are betting in Euros, the minimum stake unit is just 0.10 Euros.
With a multiple, the winnings from one bet are carried on to another. The simplest such bet is a double where both selections must win for you to win. Adding one more selection makes a treble, and then there is a four-timer accumulator and so on. The only limit is your imagination. Obviously the bigger the combination bet, the bigger the potential winnings and the higher the risk but these kinds of bets are hugely popular.
Away from the actual result, there are many other bets available on each match, some of which we’ll look at in the next tutorial, but among the most popular are the final scoreline and half-time/full-time combinations. For example in the above game, if you fancied Portsmouth to win 2-0, you could back them in the correct score market and receive odds of 10.00 (stake 1 unit, return 10.00 units including stake).
Similarly, bookmakers like Betsson split the game into two (first half and second half) and call a winner for each of the halves (often called double result) meaning if you fancied Portsmouth to be leading at both half-time and full-time, you could back them at 3.50. Alternatively if you believed Portsmouth were often slow to get going but finished as match strongly, you may opt for West Ham/Portsmouth and big odds of 35.00 would be your reward.
But when you learn that Betsson had 28 markets available on that game alone and, at the time of writing, over 4,000 individual football markets available you will see just the depth of selection available to you. And that is without even mentioning the Exchange option, where other people act as the bookmaker and offer a price which may be different to the fixed odds available.
But all that is for another article.
Why not start off by deciding the outcome of a game and have a simple match bet – you will love it. Put your new betting skills to the test at Betsson.com – the bookie with the most markets and the best odds. (Source: TopLeague.co.uk)