Hopefully you’ve read our introduction to handicapping NFL pointspread plays and the basics on NFL totals plays.  Now we’ll talk about NFL moneyline wagers.  These are some valuable concepts that will serve you well for any moneyline based wager including baseball, soccer, hockey and fights so pay attention!

I was fortunate to look older than I really was as a teenager and knew how to comport myself in an ‘adult’ manner.  For that reason, I was able to spend time in casinos and sportsbooks in Nevada before I was of legal age to do so.  I’ve been betting on sports with a good degree of success for over twenty years now, and just that experience alone has taught me a lot.  Based on that experience, here’s a cautionary tale.

I’ve seen more people go broke quickly from an over emphasis on big moneyline favorites than any other sports betting behavior.  Even people who can’t handicap their way out of a paper bag or pick the winner in a one horse race fare better than those who get obsessed with playing big favorites on the moneyline.  The primary reason for this is that it can be seductively easy to just lay a big price with a dominant team.  Typically, it works like this:  aspiring bettor starts playing big moneyline favorites in baseball or football and has some degree of initial success.  He then gets greedy, and starts playing more big moneyline favorites, parlaying big moneyline favorites and completely abandons any sort of handicapping or consideration of underdogs.

In our introduction to NFL betting we talked about the math behind moneylines and we’ll talk about that some more here.  Drill this into your brain, as nothing you learn at the outset is more important than this.  When you play big moneyline favorites, you significantly increase the ‘breakeven percentage’ necessary to maintain long term profitability.  At the standard -110 for most pointspread bets, break even is 52.4%.  Win more than that, and you’re making money.

The bigger the favorite you play, the higher your breakeven percentage.  On a practical level, it’s a pretty simple concept to understand.  When you’re laying -200 or -300 to win 100, every loss is more difficult to counteract.  At -200, you have to win over 60% of your bets just to tread water.  At -300, that number increases to 75% and gets even higher as you play higher priced moneyline favorites.

The reverse is true, however, when you play moneyline underdogs.  At +100, obviously breakeven is 50%.  And the bigger the underdog, the lower the breakeven percentage.  At +150, you only need to win 40% of the time to break even.  At +200, that number drops to 33.3%.  Based on my years of experience, you’ll be amazed at how many very ‘live’ underdogs you can find at +200 and higher.

Back to our cautionary tale:  the novice better will inevitably hit a losing streak, even playing dominant high priced favorites.  Laying so much on the outcome of one game, their bankroll will quickly hit a ‘downward spiral’ and that’s a difficult thing to recover from.

We’ll talk more about these concepts in the future, and get into more advanced strategies like understanding the true meaning of ‘value’ and learn how to determine when a play is a good value and when it isn’t.  For now, if you’re a beginning sports bettor the best advice you can take away from this is simply to not get hooked on playing big moneyline favorites.  You’ll thank me in the long run, as will your wagering bankroll.