Sports Betting 101

As a sports handicapper, you can really relate to the lifelong mantra of the great Rodney Dangerfield.  Like Rodney, we get no respect.  The most frequent image of the industry is the boiler room tout as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the 2005 film ‘Two for the Money‘.  To be sure, there’s no shortage of guys like this in the industry that spend more time screaming on scorephones about ‘locks’ and waving their arms around on early Saturday morning TV infomercials than actually handicapping sports.  The irony is that there’s plenty of demand for quality sports handicapping information, and I know firsthand that its a lot of hard work to stay ahead of the 11/10.

The college football bowl season gets underway next Saturday with the New Mexico Bowl in Albuquerque, NM and the St. Petersburg Bowl in St. Pete, FL.  And throughout the next week you can be sure that somewhere in the mainstream sports media some dull normal IQ’d talking head will be kvetching about how there are too many bowl games, how they don’t mean anything, so on and so forth.  Maybe from the rah rah standpoint of the average knuckledragger that’s the case, but personally I love all of the relatively meaningless bowl games.  I wish there were more of them.  Were it up to me, they’d start the week after Thanksgiving and any team with 3 or more wins would be eligible.  The proliferation of bowl games has been a gold mine for sharp sports handicappers and the more wagering opportunities of any sort the better.

In our previous post, we discussed the basics of how to bet on MMA.  Now, we’ll go over some fundamental handicapping concepts for beginners:

Look To Play On Underdogs: Finding ‘live’ dogs to bet on is a solid strategy in any sports betting pursuit, but it’s essential in MMA.   The reality of the sport is that once you get past the top few fighters there’s a lot of parity.  Furthermore, you’ll often find a fighter favored based on name recognition alone.  For example, one fighter has appeared on the UFC’s ‘Ultimate Fighter’ reality show and will be a favorite against a lower profile opponent simply because he’s more familiar to casual fans.

Further enhancing the parity that exists in MMA is the 5 oz. gloves which make even the top fighters in the sport susceptible to a knockout upset.

While still a niche sport in the eyes of the mainstream sports media, mixed martial arts (MMA) led by the top US based fighting promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is becoming an increasingly popular sport to bet on.  Most sportsbooks in Nevada and offshore now offer odds for major MMA events, and it offers excellent value opportunities for the astute handicapper.