• Always use your own judgment. There are plenty of pundits and touts. Some will sell you their knowledge and predictions with a lot of hyperbole. You see basically the same things they see. If you’re interested and do your homework; if you watch games, pay attention and read a lot; if you form your own opinion and stick with it, you’ll be a lot better off. You will still be wrong sometimes, but at least it was your calculated risk and not someone else’s.
• Do what is known as paper trading at first. Before wagering any real money, play or mock bet for a few weeks. Write down your bets and keep track of your record. See how you score, see if you would be winning or losing money. Once you’re comfortable, you can dive in. Remember, you must win 53% of the time if you want to make a profit. Remember, even the very best of the best only win 60% of the time over the long haul. You might be good at this, you might not – that’s a small margin.

Asian handicap betting is an increasingly popular form of betting, particularly for match bets where one side of the match bet is significantly superior to the other. The basis of Asian handicap betting lies in the way in which it attempts to even up the chances of both sides of the match.

To achieve this evening up process, the side judged to be superior is artificially handicapped for betting purposes by the market-maker, relative to the side judged to be inferior. In other words, the side perceived to be the weaker of the two is awarded a notional head start as far as the match betting is concerned. The consequence is that the odds about the two options are brought closer to each other than would be the case if no handicapping process were involved.

Asian handicap betting has two forms.
The first is the single handicap, and the second is the dual handicap. In the case of the latter, you are effectively placing two bets, each of which is worth a half of your total stake.

The idea behind betting exchanges is quite simple. It is to match up someone who wants to bet on something at a given price with someone else who is willing to offer that price. This way both sides are happy, at least until the result is known.

The person who bets on the event happening at a given price is the backer. The person who offers the price is known as the layer. In effect, he is laying the bet in exactly the same way as a bookmaker does.

The advantage of this form of betting is that it essentially cuts out the formal bookmaker, and thereby the bookmaker’s margin. It also allows everyone on the exchange to act as a bettor (backer) or bookmaker (layer) at will. Indeed, it is possible to back and lay thesame event.

The concept is beautiful. You take your fancy on an international rugby match over the weekend or a midweek football match or a golf tournament on the other side of the world, your pick comes in and a few days later a cheque drops on the doormat. It is a lovely feeling.

The reality, as we all know, is that while the cheques do come, there are also some dark days. Days when you can write out cheques to every firm after a run of bad results. Days when you have to make the call to the customer service desk at Sporting or IG and pay a margin call on your credit card because a long-term position has taken a turn against you.

Unfortunately, no matter how good a punter you are, no one wins all the time. If you are in sports betting, you need to be in it for the long term. Luck, misfortune or a run of poor judgement can mean losing streaks where you forget what it is like to see your account in credit. But the acid test is how far we are up or down in the long term when the bounce of the ball has evened itself out.

Sports betting isn’t all fun and games. You have to do your homework - and park your emotions and team loyalties at the door. Successful sports betting involves handicapping, or gathering data as diverse as weather forecasts and player statistics to determine the probability of a game’s outcome.
There are a few unofficial schools of handicapping that focus on the following:

• Fundamentals: A fundamentals handicapper focuses on one team’s strengths against another team’s weaknesses. For example, this handicapper may notice that Colorado’s receivers are all tall and that Nebraska’s cornerbacks are unusually short, creating an obscure but important mismatch that Colorado could convert into a point-spread victory.
• Statistics: Statistics handicappers dig into numbers to find advantages that other bettors may not see. They may track teams with the best rebounding, or they may identify statistical factors that lead to a pitcher’s success. They may even invent and track their own unique statistical measurements to evaluate teams or players.
• Technical: Technicians are all about trends. Like statistics handicappers, they share a fascination with numbers, but trends handicappers are trying to identify general situations where teams tend to do well or not. A technical handicapper looks through reams of past game logs and finds indicators that a team will outperform or perform poorly against the spread.

There’s more to sports betting than simple wagers, such as money line bets or point spread bets. Like other sports bets, exotic wagers have posted odds in the casino that move up and down depending on how heavy the betting is. The following list identifies some typical exotic wagers available at almost every sports book.

Parlay. A bet which involves two or more games or events in combination. All games or events must be won in order to win bet. The pay-off is higher than if games were bet separately, but you must win all. If one game is a tie, then the winnings are reduced.

Almost as popular as betting on the point spread are over/under (total) bets. Instead of picking a team in a game, the bettor determines whether the combined score of both teams will be above or below a total number. Casinos determine totals the same way they do point spreads; their goal is to split the betting evenly between the under and the over.

The point-spread is a value that bettors must add or subtract from their team’s score when they place an even-money sports bet. Favorites have negative point spreads, and underdogs have positive point spreads. Each football game is usually handicapped by a point spread, where one team is favored over the other which is the underdog. For example:

Cowboys +4
Cardinals -4

If you bet on the Cowboys, they must win by more than four points for you to win your bet. If you bet on the Cardinals, they must either win the game, or lose by three or less points for you to win your bet. If the difference is four points, say 27-23 Cowboys win, then the bet is a push and all money is returned.