Many sports bettors are familiar with the concept of handicapping; however, not too many know exactly what a handicap is in sports betting. In other words, they may know the basics of judging the strength of teams and players, but beyond that they may not have the expertise to handicap their favorite sports. Let us take a quick look at what a handicap is and how it is utilized in sports betting.
How Does Handicapping Work In Sports Betting?
Judging the strength of a sport is an essential part of any bettor’s routine. After all, if you are serious about winning at sports betting, you are going to have to learn how to properly evaluate your competition. One of the best ways to improve your odds of winning is by knowing more about the competition than your opponents do. This is where the concept of handicapping comes in.
As previously stated, judging the strength of a sport is essential to any bettor. However, there is more than one kind of handicapping that takes place beyond just simply looking at a team’s record. For instance, you can also look at the individual performances of the players on a team to get an idea of their relative strengths. This is called odd-sided or cross-match betting, and it is one of the more popular bets in the sports betting world. Essentially, this type of betting gives you the opportunity to judge a player’s prowess independent of the team they are playing for. In other words, you may look at a player’s record and see that they have a good batting average, but that does not necessarily mean that they will do well as an individual player on another team.
Knowing when to back a team based on their record and when to hedge your bets with individual players can be difficult. This is why many people prefer to use a handicap in sports betting. A handicap is a term used in horse racing to denote the difference in form between the contenders in a particular race. In other words, it is the amount of favoritism that you are going to show to one team or player over another. For example, in a horse race, if you have a ten-pound handicap, you are going to give the ten-pound favoritism to the horse that you select to win the race. This way, you are ensuring that your bet will pay off even if your horse wins by the narrowest of margins.
Similarly, in sports betting, you can give a ten-pound favoritism to a certain team or player to increase your odds of winning. This is done by adding or removing points from the score based on the team’s or player’s performance. To calculate the handicap, simply take the amount of points that you think that the favored team or player is worth and add or subtract that amount from the final score. For example, if you think that the New York Yankees are going to beat the Chicago Cubs by two runs, you can add two points to the final score to get a total of four points.
When using a handicap in sports betting, you should avoid picking teams or players that are so far ahead that there is no chance of your bet paying off. This is especially important if you want to use a lay bet (i.e., an even money bet) as the basis of your calculation. In this case, you should avoid choosing the New York Yankees in a game against the Minnesota Twins as a winner, even though the Yankees are a heavy favorite in the game.
Why Should You Try To Use A Handicap In Your Sports Betting?
If you have been playing the game for some time and you know that judging the strength of individual players can be difficult, especially when playing against teams with different lineups every game, a handicap is a perfect solution to your problem. This is because a handicap gives you the opportunity to easily calculate the probability of your favorite team or player winning a particular game. Let us take a look at an example.
On April 12, 2020, the Los Angeles Dodgers will host the New York Yankees in a series of baseball games. The Yankees are currently in first place in the American League with a 36-20 record, and the Dodgers are in fifth place with a 30-29 record. You can probably guess which team the writer of this article supports, but if you can’t, then here is a hint: it’s the Los Angeles Dodgers.
To use a handicap in this situation, first you will need to find the difference in point spreads between the two teams. The difference in point spreads is determined by subtracting the betting line of the underdogs from the betting line of the favorites. In this case, the underdogs are the New York Yankees, a team that the author supports, and they have a minus-120 betting line, while the favorites are the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that the author does not support. This difference in point spreads is ten, so you should add ten to the final score to get the full value of the handicap.
Even though the author of this article does not support the Los Angeles Dodgers, it is important to remember that there is absolutely no relationship between the two. The purpose of this article is to simply help you better understand how to utilize a handicap in sports betting so that you can optimize your profits.
Where Do I Go From Here?
After reading this article, you may feel that handicapping is a concept that you should familiarize yourself with. However, that is not necessarily the case. While knowing how to calculate a handicap can certainly be useful, you should not feel like you need to become an expert in order to successfully use a handicap in sports betting. All you need is to know which teams or players you are favoring and how much you are favoring them. To get started, use a free online calculator like this one from Coingecko to quickly find the difference in points between two teams or players and add or subtract that amount from the final score. For example, if the Seattle Mariners are playing the Houston Astros, you can enter these scores into the calculator and it will tell you the total number of points that you will need to add or subtract from the final score to get the full value of the handicap: Mariners – 20, Astros – 29. This is exactly what you should do if you want to use a handicap in sports betting so that you can easily find how much you should add or subtract from the final score to get the full value of the handicap:
As you can see, in this situation, the Houston Astros are the underdogs with a betting line of minus-110, while the Seattle Mariners are the favorites with a line of minus-40. This means that if you are going to use a handicap in this game, you should add twenty points to the final score to get the full value of the -110 points spread between the two teams. If you are looking for a game to bet on, then this is a perfect example of why you should use a handicap in sports betting. The Astros are a solid baseball team, but they are not quite as good as the Mariners, and you can see from the betting odds, this game is definitely in the range of possibility that your bet might pay off. While there is absolutely no guarantee that your bet will pay off, you certainly can increase your odds by utilizing a handicap in sports betting.