Basketball betting
Just a small spoiler: despite the title of the note, in fact, there are no secrets. Success in betting depends on several components: knowledge of the specifics of the tournament, careful observation of its progress, and competent analysis of upcoming matches. Experience and hard work play an important role in all this. Without all these components, knowing even the super important secrets of betting success will not bring you. And everyday work will help you find these very secrets on an independent basis.
But in any case, knowledge of some of the nuances will greatly help to find in a huge number of basketball matches those matches where the probability of winning is really high.
Content
- Anti-skewing bets
- Total bets
- Secrets of live betting
- Averages theory and motivation
- Summing up
Anti-skewing bets
What does a line skew mean, how to detect a bookmaker's mistake when setting odds for a basketball game? This is not difficult to do. When studying any basketball championship, you should pay attention to its performance. For example, in the NBA, performance is off the charts. This suggests that the bookmaker's analysts, when setting the odds for the total of matches, greatly underestimate them by “total more”, thereby greatly overestimating the “total less”.
This is not done in vain: bookmakers understand that many, taking into account the peculiarity of the NBA, will bet on TB, this option is often held, therefore bettors will often win. And how to reduce the probability and frequency of the bettor winning and increase your earnings? That's right, greatly reduce the odds for the probable total, and it is better to set the total significantly higher than the average. If the team scores 100 points on average, then set “total over 110”.
Sometimes the bookmaker is too keen on underestimating the odds, creating a clear bias in the line, which makes it possible to make competent bets on the total.
Total bets
Notice how all this happens in practice.
The average performance of Miami is 106.7. And this is the coefficient for the individual total of this team in the next match in BC Betcity.
The bookmaker set a coefficient of 1.82 for the fact that Miami will score more than 106.5, its average, and for ITM (Miami) 106.5 – 2. Although in this case the numbers should be equal. The rival in this match was Minnesota, which allowed their opponents to gain an average of 111.5 points. This is how the bookmaker took and underestimated the odds for the most likely outcome, which many will obviously bet on. It turns out that the office “took” a part of the winnings from the bettor, if he had bet on “ITB (1) 106.5” and this bet was played. Over the long run, this will lead to a 100% loss.
For this reason, it is better to play counter-move and develop a strategy for playing “total less”. It is best to look for situations where a team has significantly exceeded its average performance for several matches in a row. And if in the next game she is opposed by a strong opponent, you can bet on “individual total less”.
The Milwaukee Bucks have scored over 120 points in two games and only 87 points in the third game. In this meeting, the bookmakers greatly underestimated the odds by “total over”, and in the end they “played” the opposite variation.
How to correctly place bets on the NBA in general can be found in a separate review.
Secrets of live betting
Basketball is the best sport for live betting due to the rapidity of events in the match. If we take football, then the situation here may not change for a long time, sometimes it is not clear what happens on the field for 30-40 minutes. In hockey, events are much faster, so bettors who focus on live bets pay more attention to ice battles.
In basketball, everything goes even faster and the situation on the court can change radically at any moment. All this creates good preconditions for successful online play. Only the main task of the bettor is to find out the changes in the match faster than the bookmaker's analysts, and before the analysts make changes to the online line for the current match, to have time to place a bet. There are a lot of situations in basketball for a successful game, for clarity, we will consider one of them.
As soon as one of the teams is defeated in the 1st quarter or in the first half of the meeting, you can safely bet on a positive handicap of the losing team in the 2nd quarter or 2nd half of the match.
This is one of the VTB League matches, where you can see how in the first quarter Parma defeated Kalev with a score of 30: 9. In the second quarter, it was possible to safely put the guests on a positive head start. There are a lot of such situations in basketball games, where rarely, after such a powerful failure in the first quarter, the team also lost powerfully in the second.
Here's another prime example.
And here it was possible to safely bet on a positive handicap of a strongly losing team in the 2nd quarter. The success of the bet is based on a subtle psychological moment: the winning team, having received a huge advantage, relaxes a little, the losing team, on the contrary, gathers and demonstrates a strong game based on overwhelming motivation.
Looking for a convenient moment like this, the main thing is to quickly make a promising bet.
Sometimes it is difficult to make a pre-match bet in the Euroleague basketball, where teams from different championships fight each other. For this reason, many people place bets on the matches of this tournament online.
Averages theory and motivation
Due to the fact that basketball is highly effective, it is in this sport that the theory of averages is most effectively used. It is well applicable not only in total, but also in betting on players.
In the “Portland Trail Blazers – Philadelphia Seventi Sixers” duel, one could see such offers for the players, where it is worth highlighting the “Portland” point guard Damian Lillard. This good player had such indicators before this meeting.
Now it is clear why the bookmaker offers to play on “TB / TM 26.5”, and not, for example, “TB / TM 19.5”. The work of the analysts of the offices is extremely simple: take the average indicators and underestimate the coefficients for the obvious option. It is worth noting how cleverly the bookmaker acts: for the total over 26.5 there is a greatly underestimated coefficient of 1.77.
How to correctly use the theory of averages for betting on players? Let's see how many points one of the most productive players of the team scored. In our case, this is the Portland player, Lillard.
For each match, you can see such detailed statistics, where we see that Lillard scored 25 points in the last match. And so you should see how many points the player scored in the last 3-5 meetings. If it will be seen that Lillard in the last 2-3 meetings was gaining significantly higher than his current average, for example, 32 and 34 points, then you can safely play for “total less”. He is clearly going to have a recession. In addition, bookmakers are very inert, they also see that Lillard has been gaining too many points lately and greatly underestimate the odds for the “total over” of this player, which makes it possible to successfully play counter-move at an overestimated odds for the “total under”, as we see in the presented case.
When Lillard showed weak performance in several matches, the bookmaker also reacts to this, starting to underestimate the odds by “total less”. But if a player does not have an injury, then his motivation begins to go off-scale, to play powerfully and score as many points for his team as possible. If the bookmaker in such a situation greatly underestimated the odds by “total less”, then you can safely bet on the “TB” of this player.
All the secrets of betting on basketball, as in other sports, are in one thing: to look for moments when there is a good opportunity to play against the odds specially underestimated by the bookmakers. If the bookmaker has underestimated the coefficient by “total over”, then you should try to play at the highly overestimated coefficient “total under”.
Summing up
In the end, it should be said once again that knowing the secrets does not help those who bet carelessly. Only hard work and perseverance with the help of certain knowledge will allow the bettor to be in the black.
