Press "Enter" to skip to content

Basketball Betting Types and Handicapping Explained

Sebastian Langer 0

The world of sport offers us so many exciting opportunities to bet on our favourite games and basketball is no different. Basketball is one of the four major sports and offers fast paced and exciting games with opportunities to bet throughout.

If you are new to the sport you can learn to place your bet quickly, its really simple.

Types of Bets

Money Line Betting

Money line bets are the simplest bets and are usually played using odds. In a money liner you bet on a winning team. There are obvious favourites in tournaments and so the odds are used to stop punters betting on the favourites all the time.

The odds work as follows, team 1 are -300 and team 2 are +240, this means the betters will need to bet $30 to win $10 if they bet on team 1, and $10 to win $24 if they bet on team 2.

Handicap or Point Spread Betting

The point spreading try’s to even the betting field between two teams. The stronger team, known as the favourites will ‘give’ points to the team expected to lose, known as the underdogs. What this means is, if team 1 was the favourite and team 2 the underdogs the bookmaker will decide the point spread e.g. 15. To win a bet on the favourites, they need to win by 16 points or more, and players who bet on team 2 would win if team two won, or lost by 14 points or less.

Totals Betting

Totals betting is also known as overs or unders. Pretty straight forward the combined score of the two teams in a particular game is predicted and betters are able to bet over or under.

An example would be if the predicted total score of the two teams is 100. Anyone who placed an over bet would win if the total score was 101 or higher, and anyone that bed under would win if the score was 99 or lower. A push or tie happens when the score is the same as what was predicted, in this case 100. When this happens, no one wins.

Parlay Betting

Parlay betting allows you to link multiple bets across a team or multiple games. As an example, you could play a point spread, money line and totals bet on one game, and if they all come through your winnings will be much higher than if you had won each individually. You could also parlay bet over multiple games, if there were two games being played at the same time you could bet on both, if your predictions for both are correct you win, but if one loses you lose.

You can always place your bets online using Bitcoin betting.

A Few More Things to Consider

In basketball, like all other sports, there are always other things to consider before placing your bets. Home court advantage can play a big role in basketball, and has a strong effect on team confidence and therefor performance. Winning multiple games increases motivation and can lead to sweeping winning streaks, and multiple losses often lead to catastrophic seasonal blow outs.

You need to consider player injury and how teams mates have been playing together. Is anyone recently recovered from an injury? Have the teams travelled a long way, or are the coming to the end of a big tournament with multiple games?

Each can affect the outcome on the game.

Comments are closed.