Shopping for the Best Line
Many sports bettors spend a lot of time figuring out what sportsbook is their favorite. They compare how much juice the book takes, what kinds of rewards or bonuses they give out, and how sharp the lines are. Finally, after a lot of research, they settle in with the one sportsbook they like better than any other. Then they do all of their online sports betting at their favorite site, certain that they made the best choice for them.
A lot of these players really do find the best book for them – but even when that’s true, they’ve still made a huge mistake. See, any good sports gambler knows that you should have accounts at multiple sites. This is true for several reasons.
First, there are a few minor ones. For instance, every time you join a new site, you’ll be able to take advantage of the sign up bonuses offered by that site. If these bonuses are lucrative, you’re throwing away money by not opening up accounts at these sites, even if you only use them to clear the bonuses they offer.
You’ll also notice that most sportsbooks offer various promotions during the year, or on certain days of the week. It’s likely that there are a few books that – while not as good as your favorite site – offer promotions that sometimes would make them worth playing at instead. If you only have a single online sportsbook account, you’ll never be able to take advantage of the great promotions that other sites are offering – and who wants to pass down a free bet?
Line Shopping
But the biggest advantage of all to be gained by having several online sports betting accounts is line shopping. Line shopping is the process of looking at several independent sites and figuring out which one gives you the best available odds on the bets you want to make.
Line shopping comes in two varieties. The simplest task is “vig shopping,” in which you check out which sportsbook is taking the smallest cut from each bet. This is usually done when dealing with a spread bet. For instance, if one site offers lines of -110, while another offers reduced juice lines of -107, you’ll want to play at the site offering the -107 lines. This might sound like a tiny difference, but it cuts the percentage of wins needed to break even from 52.4% to 51.7%. That doesn’t look like a lot, but since sports betting is all about small advantages, cutting your breakeven percentage down by even .7% will make a huge difference in your final profit margin. You can often find reduced juice lines as part of promotions that make the lines as low at -105, or even (on rare occasions) -100, making the bet a coin flip!
You’ll also want to compare the spreads and money lines offered by different books – this is what is more traditionally known as line shopping. If you want to bet on a favorite, you’d much rather bet on them with a spread of -4 than at one with -4.5 or -5. If you use a variety of sportsbooks, including some that create their own independent lines, you’ll often find variations between the offered spreads at different sites. Money lines work the same way; it’s always better to get +250 than +230 on a money line, and finding these differences make it much easier to make a profit from sports betting.
While each advantage you find by line shopping might be tiny, they add up in a big way over the course of your gambling career. If you want to be a successful sports bettor, line shopping should be a critical part of your sports gambling strategy.
