Sports Betting 101

NASCAR’s seemingly never ending racing season starts today and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.  Whether or not you enjoy NASCAR, sportsbooks are offering more and more opportunities to bet on it.  And NASCAR betting is one of the best value opportunities on the board.

There’s a number of different ways to wager on NASCAR and a wide variety of strategies to employ.  Over the next week or so, we’ll get you up to speed (no pun intended) on some of the theoretical background of NASCAR betting and some of the various strategies and tactics you can use to turn a profit.  For today, however, we’ll keep it simple.

The Vancouver Winter Olympics begin this weekend and not surprisingly there’s plenty of wagering opportunities at various sportsbooks on the games.   In theory, the Olympics are a good opportunity for the betting public to take advantage of the books’ lack of familiarity with many events.  The problem is that with so many obscure sports there’s not many handicappers who have the know how to exploit this weakness.  This is particularly true in the Winter Olympics, where countless cross country skiing and curling type events are held–events that most Americans don’t even know the rules of, let alone who’ll win or lose.

As was reported at Sports Untapped yesterday, arena football will be back this April and back on TV in the US thanks to a broadcast deal with the NFL Network. The new breed arena football league called ‘Arena Football 1′ will be made up of former AFL teams along with teams from ‘AFL2′ which was nominally the ‘minor league affilate’ of the sport.

Arena Football is actually something of a growth industry at the moment.  After falling off the map with the demise of the Arena Football League, there are now three fairly significant entries into the marketplace including ‘AF1′.  There’s the IFL (Indoor Football League) which will begin play  in late February with 23 teams.  Several former AFL2 teams passed up the opportunity to join AF1, opting instead to move to the IFL.  There’s also the American Indoor Football Association, who will begin their 2010 season in March with 13 teams.   So far, they’re not directly in competition with each other though my hunch is that at some point they’ll start to consolidate and work out a ‘pecking order’.  Eventually, the likely scenario is that we’ll have a setup similar to the old one with a definite ‘market leader’ and a secondary ‘developmental league’.

Yesterday, we talked about some general Superbowl betting concepts and today we’re going to look at some specific tips on what you should do–and in some cases not do–when betting the Superbowl.  If you didn’t read the first part of this article, I suggest you go do so as this will all make a lot more sense to you.

In a perfect world, the sports betting public would treat the Superbowl like just another game.  That’s not going to happen, of course, as there are too many people making money by espousing the concept that it’s *not* just another wagering opportunity.  Here’s a good case in point–you may be surprised to learn that I don’t come from a ’sports betting family’ and that my mom is a real estate agent.  I called her yesterday and the first thing she said is that ‘everyone in the office is talking about betting the Superbowl’.  Keep in mind that these are real estate agents, not sports touts.  The sports media will talk about the Superbowl nonstop for the next two weeks, sports touts will scream about unloading on the Superbowl based on their ‘inside information’, so on and so forth.