Spread in football explained

The answer to what is a point spread. Sports betting spreads spread. The spread in football explained Buccaneers won Pro Football Reference quotes as the closing line. Point Spreads. In its simplest form, a point spread refers to how many points a team is favored over their opponent. It's not as simple as. When your bet results in a push, you get your money back. Betting the spread is more popular in higher scoring sports like football and basketball where there. For example, if the stronger team, or favorite, is a perceived six points better than a weaker team, the stronger will be given an NFL bet spread of This.

How Do I Read Sports Betting Odds This Football Season?

What does a spread of minus 7 mean? If the Titans are a 7-point favorite over the Jaguars, it'll be presented as “-7″ at your sportsbook. That means the Titans need to win by more than seven points for you to cash your: Titans -7. The “minus” 7 is because you take their score at the end of the game and subtract seven points from it.

Explaining The Point Spread

Parlay bets are wagers that combine two or more different bets into one overall bet. The maximum number of bets you can parlay varies by sportsbook, but the limit is generally pretty high. You can have a two-team Prop bets were most frequently discussed around the time of the Super Bowl, where What are future bets. A future bet is a bet placed on a sports event that will take place in the future, as opposed to a specific upcoming game.

Futures usually deal with season-ending events, ie. Understanding Moneyline Betting and its Strategies With the proliferation of online betting, everyone from professional gamblers to complete newbies are diving into the world of online sports betting, but some of the terms and phrases can There are three ways to bet on a sporting event that are significantly more popular than any other type of bet.

The first is betting against the spread, where you have to decide if a team will win or lose by a certain amount of points. Explaining The Point Spread. What Does Betting the Spread Mean. If you bet on the Celtics: If they win by 8. If they lose or win by less than 8. If they come within 8. If they lose by more than 8.

When your bet results in a push, you get your money back. What Affects the Point Spread. How popular the team is: Nationally popular teams like Duke Basketball, The Dallas Cowboys, the LA Lakers, the New York Yankees, or Alabama Football receive a lot of betting interest, so oddsmakers may move the spread against them to ensure enough people are betting on both sides.

Injuries: Games, specifically basketball or football games can be significantly changed due to key injuries. Amount of money bet: If a ton of money is already bet on one side, oddsmakers can move the line to even things out for that reason alone. Weather: Weather is an important factor in football where many games are still played outside.

Teams like the Patriots, Packers, and Bills are known to play well in cold weather, but what if the Miami Dolphins are traveling to Buffalo in December. Spread in football explained The weather may shift the spread giving the Bills more points. Of course, if a spread is a half number, ie. How Are Spread Odds Calculated?

Single bet Parlay. Bet slip. Add bet. Bet amount. Can I Parlay Spread Bets. We will explain them in order, from the most simple to the most complicated. In uncertain times, sometimes waiting until the last second to bet, is your best bet : Picture this: You place a bet on Thursday for a Sunday NFL game. Now, you are stuck with a bad line on a team you possibly no longer want to bet.

Either way, by betting early you have accidentally painted yourself into a betting corner. But more relevant here, the only thing that matters is units won. What is a unit. A unit is the amount of money you are generally comfortable placing on one bet. That number varies, of course, for every person. Shop for the best spread : Suppose that you want to bet on the Dallas Mavericks as a 7 point favorite against the Sacramento Kings in a hypothetical NBA game.

You really think the Mavericks are a lock to win the game and the number feels somewhat low to you. But, you wish the number was a little higher because the Mavericks beat the Kinds by 7 points in their last game and you are nervous about a push.

Well, if you look hard enough you might be able to find that extra half-point. Many betting sites offer slightly different numbers and if you use a site that lists the spreads for every book you can price shop and find the best spread for your side. However, for a Radford-Winthrop college basketball game, even a medium sized bet can change the line for a game on one specific site.

Sometimes a bet can be so big that it will cause one book to move their line, to spread their risk to the other side, and every single other reputable site will make the move proactively. The key here is that there are many reasons for the betting spread to change, but you need to be acutely aware of why a line is moving.

For example, people are certain that the week after NFL teams fire their coaches, particularly unpopular coaches, they are locks to win. In baseball run lines , the odds for betting on the underdog are usually negative less than even money because sportsbooks believe it is more likely for the underdog to win the game or lose by 1 run than it is for the favorite to win by 2 runs or more.

Point spreads in soccer are very similar to baseball. They are usually set at 1. In this example, the Galaxy needs to win by at least 2 goals for spread bets on the Galaxy to win. When a team covers the spread, that means bettors who placed spread bets on that team won their bet. In our first example above 76ers -5 , if the 76ers won the game by 6 points or more, that means they covered the spread.

A push means that the favorite won the game by a margin equal to the spread. In our example, if the 76ers won by exactly 5 points, then all spread bets on that game would push. Online Sportsbooks often include 0. Since scoring in major sports does not include half-points, it is impossible for a spread bet to push when the line includes a half-point. This 0. In our example, if the spread was 76ers A moneyline bet is a bet on the outright winner of the game.

A point spread bet is a bet on the margin of victory. One reason to bet on the point spread instead of the moneyline is to get better odds for betting on the favorite. One of the main benefits of betting on the point spread is that the odds are usually pretty close to even money e. This means that you have to risk less money to win the same amount as placing a bet with longer odds e.

Betting on the point spread also means that watching a game can remain interesting even when the final outcome is no longer in doubt. If the Eagles are However, you remain interested in what happens because if the other team scores a late touchdown to bring the margin down to 13, suddenly the Eagles are no longer covering the spread, even though they still have a big lead and are likely to win the game.

That is an example of how spread betting can lead to frustrating end-of-game situations. Imagine you placed a spread bet on Eagles The game is tied with 1 minute left and the Eagles are driving down the field. They get down to the goal line but time is running out, and instead of trying to score the touchdown you need to win your bet, they kick a field goal to win the game by 3.

Now you are left with a bittersweet feeling where your team won but your bet lost. In sports betting, a parlay is when you make a combination of bets that all need to win in order for the parlay bet to win. If any leg of the parlay does not win, then the whole parlay loses. Nfl weather forecast week 3 The benefit of a parlay is that you can get much better payouts if you win your bet.

The odds on most point spread bets are For every leg you add after that, your odds will essentially double. That may sound appealing, but parlay bets are very difficult to hit, which is why the odds are so high. We said above that a point spread describes the expected margin of victory by the favored team in a given game.

The real answer is that sportsbooks set the number for the point spread based on what number they expect will lead to equal action i. So it is more like a measure of public expectations rather than what will actually happen. Sportsbooks ideally want to have equal action on both sides of a bet. If the bets are too heavily weighted towards one side, that increases liability for the sportsbook if that side of the bet ends up winning.

Of course, setting a point spread is an inexact science, and sportsbooks often do not get equal action on both sides of a point spread. When this happens, the sportsbook will adjust the line to make it more appealing to place bets on the side getting less action.

This creates a better balance between bets on each team. Other factors such as injury updates or roster changes can also impact betting lines. Betting markets are like any other market: prices fluctuate. As the market gains more information like betting trends , prices change based on that information.

Comparing that to the current odds shows what direction the market is moving.