Thankfully, the Winter Olympics have ended and we’re about to get into one of the best times of the year for sports betting enthusiasts.  The NHL will get back to work on Tuesday, exhibition baseball will start on Tuesday and the NBA and college hoops will be in full gear.  NASCAR is underway, we’ve still got some league soccer action in Europe and the World Cup this summer–which may be the biggest betting event in history.  We’ll even have Arena Football again starting in early April.  Throw in all of the Triple Crown prep races and the long awaited showdown between Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta at the Apple Blossom Stakes in early April and its an epic time for sports betting.

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup series makes their annual pilgrimage to Southern Nevada on Sunday for the Shelby American at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.  We had a good week with our NASCAR betting last week as we hit a winner on Jimmie Johnson at Fontana.  We’ll try to keep the winners coming this week in a notoriously tough track to handicap.

Since NASCAR starting running in Las Vegas back in 1998 there have been eight different winners (Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch and Sterling Marlin) and three multiple winners (Burton and Kenseth twice, Johnson three times). Compounding the difficulty in handicapping the race, the track was completely reconfigured in 2006.  The most important change impacting Sprint Cup racing was adding more graduated banking in the corners to encourage side by side racing.

Back to soccer betting action for Sunday as Liverpool gets back into English Premier League play with a home game against the Blackburn Rovers.  The last time we saw Liverpool in action they were cashing a ticket for us as they beat Unirea Urziceni in Europa League play.  Now that they’re back at home, they’ll have to maintain their good form to stay in sight of the top of the EPL table.  Manchester City got a leg up on Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur for the #4 spot with their upset road win at Chelsea on Saturday.  It was Chelsea’s first loss at Stamford Bridge this season, and gave Manchester City a 3 point lead over Tottenham and a 4 point lead over Liverpool and Aston Villa.  The good news is that Blackburn is a lower half of the table squad and that’s exactly what Liverpool needs to stay in contention.

There’s a ton of college basketball betting opportunities on the board at your local sportsbooks today, but value is not always easy to find at this point of the season.  Some teams are having their ‘Senior Day’, meaning they give inordinate playing time to upperclassman stiffs.  Other teams quit caring a lot time ago, and even good teams may have decided to ‘pack it in’ until the conference tournaments begin.  For that reason, this Saturday’s card is an especially tricky one fraught with untold danger.

One concept that usually works, however, is one we refer to often in NHL handicapping:  “styles make fights”.  An effective (for us) stylistic matchup isn’t subject to vagaries like who plays and, to a lesser extent, the focus or motivation of the team.  Some styles result in bad matchups for some teams, and by finding those matchups we can often find line value.  That looks to be the case in this Conference USA battle between Houston and SMU: