Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series — Betting on the Spread
Video Transcript Below
What is a Points Spread in Betting
Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series, explains the common questions around how does sports betting work? This section covers: What is Bet Spread and Lines for Sports Betting
Specifically, what is a spread in sports betting and what does a point spread mean — when it comes to strategy for sports betting.
Andrew Pace
Andrew is a Multi-Millionaire, Professional Sports Value Analyst & the Creator of inplayLIVE — an online program & community that teaches how to invest on live sports through the art of value wagering. He’s taught thousands of students to successfully beat the book and go on to reach 5, 6 and 7-figure profits.
Video Transcript
What's up everyone. Welcome to the next segment of our sports betting, how-to series, where we teach you how to sports bet. My name is Andrew Pace, founder and CEO of inplayLIVE live, where we teach our robust community and membership base. How to profit from betting on sports over the longterm today, we're going to be covering in our sports betting 101.
How does sports betting work? But more specifically, we're going to be talking about betting on the spread and what does it mean to bet the spread?
So what is the spread and how does it all work? Really simply put, the spread is what makes any game a coin flip. When you have a really heavy, favorite playing a huge underdog that favorite might win the game.
80 90, even 99% of the time where their opponent is far inferior, far worse than they are. So that can actually be from a viewership or a betting standpoint. Very, very boring. You know, if we bet on that heavy favorite, you know, we wagered your a hundred dollars on them and they're, you know, Projected to win 95% of the time.
We might only make a few dollars back after risking a hundred, and that's just not exciting for a lot of people. And that's how the spread was created. When we put a spread on a game, it doesn't matter how big of a favorite you have. It can remain exciting to the very final whistle, right, until the very end of the game.
As an example, if we're looking at let's just say basketball. We might have team A as a heavy favorite in the game where Vegas and the sports book have decided that a true coin flip in that game is minus 10 and a half. What that means is team A needs to win by 11 or more points to cover the spread.
So they're going to win the game, let's say 90% of the time, but with the minus 10 and a half spread, theoretically speaking, they're only going to cover it 50% of the time, which then makes the game a lot more exciting. If we wagered a hundred dollars on it, we're not going to get a one or two or $5 return.
We might get a 90 or $95 return in that circumstance. On the flip side of that. Team B - let’s say they're the underdog. They can cover 10 and a half points and win the wager, which means that if they lose by 10 or less points or when the game they covered the spread on the plus side.
And we're going to be looking right now at how to bet the spread.
All right. So right off the bat here, I am logged into Pinnacle, which is my absolute favorite online sports betting book in Canada for pregame betting.
They offer some of the most favorable lines, which means that they actually often pay better than other sports betting sites. If we were to wager a hundred dollars on a game on Pinnacle, it might pay us out $5 more than any other site.
And that's the kind of thing that actually adds up over time. So when it comes to sports betting the spread, we're actually going to click on basketball. We're going to see the whole list of games available to us tonight.
The first thing you're going to see red at the top here is the Phoenix suns minus three and a half against the Philadelphia, 76 plus three and a half.
This means that the Phoenix Suns are the favorite in the scheme. And you can see that by the Moneyline here. If I click on this Moneyline wager and I go to wager $100, it's going to return me $166 and 23 cents.
But you only profit $66 from wagering that side of the game.
On the flip side of that, if I were to click on the Philadelphia 76ers, when I'm talking about betting on the money line, I click and there, you can see it's going to return me $236, but profit me $136.
So that is a perfect example of where we see the Phoenix Suns as the favorite in tonight's game.
Now, in order to make this game a coin flip, they've put the spread in so Vegas and the sports books have determined that the Phoenix Suns are a minus three and a half. point spread.
This means that they need to win by four or more points to cover the spread tonight.
We're on the flip side of that, the Philadelphia 76ers, and lose the game by one, two or three points or win the game to cover their side of the spread. And that's really an example.
And as you scroll down here, you're going to see all these different spreads tonight. And here's a much bigger one with the Detroit Pistons taking on the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Mavericks are a minus 10 and a half point favorite.
This means that if you wager them on the Moneyline, if we go to place a a hundred dollar wager, we're only going to profit $16 and 50 cents. If they win. Whereas the Detroit pistons. We're going to profit $475 if they win.
All of these odds listed right now are in American odds. But one of the things that I love about Pinnacle is you can just easily click up here at the top and switch over to decimal. If you prefer the decimal OD system. Now, when we're scrolling down here, I'm going to actually teach you how to do point spread betting, and actually make a wager on the spread here.
So I am a big Golden State Warriors fan. So I'm actually going to wager on them to win tonight. They are slight favorites, but I'm going to wager on them to cover minus two.
So in this particular case, if the Golden State Warriors win by exactly two, I'll get my wager back, which is referred to as a push.
But if they win by three or more, I'll win my wager. If the warriors only win by one or they lose the game, the Washington Wizards will cover the spread in this particular example. So I'm going to Wade your $500 on this. And as you can see, it's going to return me $480 and 50 cents. And when it comes to sports, betting, odds and odds, calculators, right?
If you didn't have this, you could just simply take $500, multiply it by 1.961 because that's the decimal odds. And that's precisely the, um, answer here is the $480 and 50 cent, uh, return. So I'm going to go ahead and lock in that wager tonight on the Golden State Warriors, and that is sports betting, the spread.
I've also taught you how to read the spread, which I think is something that's very, very simple to understand. And there's one last thing that I want to touch on when it comes to the spread itself, you're going to notice that each side of the game is actually in negative odds when we click on American odds, which means that the profits are less than what you wagered.
Whereas if it's in plus odds like the Moneyline here for the Cleveland Cavaliers, that means you're going to profit more than what you wagered. So if I type in 500 here, it's going to return $560 and you can see that there now, when it comes to negative odds, when you set a coin flip for any given game and you have negative odds on both sides, That's what's referred to as the vague or vigorous.
And what that is is that is the cut that the house takes and how sports bet sports betting books, online sports books, profit off of us, the sports betters over time, they're taking theoretical coin flips where in order for us to break, even over time, we would need odds of 2.0 or plus 100 and they're putting negative odds on them.
So that in theory, over time, We lose money. And one of the great things about in play live is we actually teach you how to win money. So I hope you learned a whole bunch today about point spread in betting and you know how to read the spread and how really everything works around wagering or betting on the point spread.
If you want to learn more about how you can actually profit from sports betting. Click the link below in our bio. We're going to do a little, uh, webinar on how you can profit, uh, over the longterm from live sports betting, which is something that I think if you're interested in this at all, you should definitely check out.
And finally, Pinnacle is an amazing sports betting site that I recommend everyone use from a pregame standpoint. It's also a sports book where winners play, which means that if you win money over time, They will continue to allow you to play there. And they have some amazing resources. I'm going to click on betting resources here, and you can see under betting tools.
They have lots of things like bet, calculators, arbitrage, calculators, margin, calculators, and a whole bunch more so that you can get familiar earlier with the changes between American odds, decimal odds, and comparing different sports books, odds with each other, which is. Referred to as arbitrage or sure betting.
I hope you learned something today and look forward to seeing you soon.