The Best Betting Options for These Professional Sports

Sports fans love to pour over the details and learn all the stats behind their favorite teams and athletes. To them, sports are more than a hobby, they’re a way of life. In between watching games, they love to test their knowledge with fantasy sports and sports betting. Each sport naturally has its own style of play that makes it more compatible with certain types of bets. So, let’s take a look at some examples.

NFL Football: Point Spreads, Moneyline

NFL football has numerous betting types that are popular, but point spread betting is certainly the most common. This is the classic football bet. In every matchup, there is an underdog and a favorite to win. With point spread bets, you are placing a wager on whether you think the underdog will keep the contest within a certain amount of points, or beat the favorite outright. This takes a lot of knowledge and experience to understand how offenses and defenses match up together.

After point spread bets, you’ll likely encounter moneyline wagers. As football is a team sport, moneyline wagers help simplify the betting action. If you have never heard of this type of bet before, you may be wondering - how do moneylines work? Luckily these are the easiest type of wagers to pick up for your average bettor.

With a moneyline wager, you are betting on which team you think will win outright. Football is an incredibly demanding sport where there are many details and nuances involved. Instead of trying to deduce whether a team can keep the score within a certain amount of points, like spread betting, moneyline wagers cut through the noise and analytics and instead just let you select a winner.

Basketball: Point Spreads, Totals, Brackets

Both professional and college level basketball are very popular for bettors and they attract a lot of betting action. Like football, point spread bets are the most popular type. However, there are some other popular wagers.

Point totals is another common type of wager that you will encounter. It is very simple to understand. Here, you are wagering whether you think the two teams' combined score will exceed a certain amount, meaning you are betting on whether it will be a low or high scoring game.

Also, when March Madness comes around you’ll find that bracket betting is incredibly popular amongst college basketball enthusiasts. Here, you will fill out an entire bracket for all of the teams involved in this tournament. At the end of the tournament, you are awarded based on how many matchups and winners you got right.

Mixed Martial Arts: Parlays, Over/Under, Method of Finish

Mixed Martial Arts is a thrilling sport that has an unpredictable nature. Matchups are heavily discussed for weeks in the buildup to an MMA event but when it comes time to fight, anything can happen. This makes MMA an intriguing sport for bettors as there are very favorable odds if you understand skills and matchups.

Of course, to really take advantage of these favorable odds you must know the best types of bets to place. Over/Under bets are popular because you do not have to select a winner. In this type of wager you are betting on whether you think a certain fight will last longer than the halfway point. When it’s two knockout artists facing off, you know that the contest is most likely not going to go the distance.

Another type of wager is betting on the method of finish. If you are confident that one fighter will finish the other, betting on the exact type of finish, like KO or submission, can net you a very large payout. Lastly, parlay wagers are also popular among MMA bettors. This is because MMA does not have “seasons” or schedules like other sports. On one night, there could be 10 or more scheduled bouts. MMA bettors enjoy selecting a winner for every event on a ticket and see how their luck turns out.

Dricus du Plessis says he's calling the shots when it comes to an Israel Adesanya fight.

📰 https://t.co/JJwFR5UmBN pic.twitter.com/ZZKIvFv3Jp

— MMA Fighting (@MMAFighting) March 6, 2024

Baseball: Runline

Baseball is a sport of millimeters and milliseconds. Every athlete on the field must perform every motion perfectly to get that double or even triple play. At the majors league level, the defense is exceptionally strong meaning there can be low scoring games at times. Because of this, so-called “runline” wagers were invented.

Runline wagers are baseball’s own unique form of point spread betting. In the same sense, you are betting on whether or not an underdog will keep the game within a certain score. The runline is normally +1.5 or -1.5, meaning that if you bet on the underdog team and they keep the game within 1 run, your wager would be successful. Runline and moneyline wagers are the two most popular forms of betting in baseball.