Beginner's Guide To Legal Sports Betting

Know How Betting Odds Work

The odds are perhaps the most important thing you will encounter in all of sports betting. How much you will receive for a successful wager is totally dependent on the odds set by the sportsbook. This will show you who is favored to win, the favored, and who is likely to lose, the underdog. Underdogs pay more, but this is because it is a longer shot that the team or individual in question will take the event.

Odds are one of the more confusing parts of sports betting. Presented in a variety of ways, odds are formulated depending on the location from which you hail. The United States, for instance, uses moneyline format. The United Kingdom format is also known as fractional odds. The European standard for sports betting is found in the decimal odds. While there are other forms of odds, these are the basic formats that you will find through most of the best legal online sportsbooks. The United States uses the money line format, which is presented as +100 for even money, which would be 1/1 in fractional or 2.00 in decimal. These odds can be converted fairly easily, provided you know the formula.

Legal Sports Betting Wager Types

Once you have a grip on the way that odds work, you will be ready to move on to the betting types. Betting types are amongst the most confusing part of sports betting, particularly because there are a large number of them. Betting types come in many forms, from the immediate to the future. There are also betting types that occur to outcomes that have no bearing on the actual result of the game. We have compiled a brief list of the different types of bets in order for you to fully understand everything that you will have at your disposal. Straight wagers, proposition bets, and exotic bets are the general bet type categories you will encounter, and we have listed each of these below in our legal online sportsbook beginner's guide.

Straight Wagers

- Money line, or who will win out right
- Spread, or who will win or lose by how much
- Total Score or Over under, where you will wager on whether the total score of the game will be above or under a predetermined amount

Exotic Bets

- Parlays, or one bet on multiple events, comes with higher payouts
- Teasers, or combined bets on two or more games, where the bettor can adjust the point spread in their favor
- Pleasers, which are reversed teasers
- If Win bets are similar to parlays, but they carry a slight return if your wager is a loss.

Team & Player Prop Bets

Proposition Bets are the most diverse of all types of wagers, as they come in many different forms. Prop bets are one of the more fun parts of the legal sports betting beginners guide. Prop bets allow you to bet on specific instances in a game - Will player X fumble the ball, or will team Y win the coin toss are perfect examples - and collect money if the bets come through. Prop bets are incredibly diverse, and include immediate bets and even future wagers, wagers that will culminate some time down the line. An example of a future bet is that of betting on who will win the Super Bowl before the season even starts. Prop bets, due to the nature of the wagers, have some of the highest payouts in all of sports betting.