Placing wagers on the match results is a quirky way to earn money. Be it offline or online; it does take experience and knowledge of the math involved. Placing wagers on the match results is a quirky way to earn money.

Be it offline or online; it does take experience and knowledge of the math involved.

Sports betting is a huge industry (see betting turnover in GB). It extends to non-human and non-athletic events like horse racing, greyhound racing, and illegal cockfighting. This article brings you a few ideas that you need to be familiar with to pull off the online bets in sports.

First of all, understand the math

Before anything else, remember the golden rule:

You need to win 52.4% of all the bets you placed to break even as a sports bettor.

Many people get confused and assume that winning 50% of their bets will help them break, while some people like to believe that anything above the 50% winning ratio will yield profits. Although it is true that most of the bets have a 50% probability of wins, the bookmakers make you place wagers for $110 for winning $100.

So let us simplify this. If you lose half the time and lose more money than when you win the other times, you are going to have a net loss in the long run. Imagine that you placed 2 bets and you won one and lost the other.

You win $100 in the wager you won, but in the wager you lost, you lose $110, which clearly leads to a loss of $10. Just to give you a heads up, this is only the beginning of the math you need to understand if you wish to make money through bets.

Be a Contrarian

Many websites on the internet provide estimates of what percentage of the action is one side and on the other for a sport. For instance, you may find a game of football wherein 70% of the viewers are betting on one side and the rest on the other side.

If you place your wager along with the 30% rather than with the majority, you are a contrarian, i.e., you are betting on the other side of what most people are placing their bets on.

Here is the good news! Being a contrarian generally means betting on the underdog. Most people usually prefer to place their bets on favorites rather than on underdogs.

Betting on underdogs helps you win a higher percentage of bets compared to betting on the favorite ones. Although it won’t be a great profit margin in the long run, betting on underdogs is a good winning strategy for beginners who just started out venturing in the sea of sports bets.

Make sure to manage your bankroll

The popular expression “on any given Sunday” refers to the possibility of upsets in football, meaning that on any given Sunday, any team can win, irrespective of who people might think of.

This implies that regardless of how confident you may be in your bets; you can still lose. Thereby, in the short run, you may lose a greater percentage of bets than you anticipate.

What does this infer in terms of managing your bankroll? It clearly states that you should never have a lot of your bankroll placed in a bet at any given point. If you tend to have low tolerance levels for risks, bet not more than 1 percentage of your bankroll on each wager.

For a bankroll of say $10000, it simply means limiting the value of each individual wager to $100. If you are relatively more tolerant, you can increase it to 5% on each bet, thereby raising the value of each wager to $500.

You can make modifications in the values depending on your confidence level in each pick. However, we suggest limiting the value of your bets to avoid a series of upsets and bad luck from running you out.

Closing thoughts

Yes, people do make money through sports betting online, and you can too! In fact, with the right knowledge and awareness, you can make profitable bets almost every other day.

Keep away from buying sports picks from people who claim that they are experts, but in reality are far away from being experts.

But it takes a smart and an experienced approach rather than a confused and clumsy one. We suggest the contrarian approach is great for a start to winning online bets.

Make sure to clearly understand the math involved in online betting and manage your bankrolls accordingly.

We recommend to visit reliable bookmaker websites for hassle-free experience. Some sites list various interesting bet offers (or even free bet offers or welcome bonuses ) to help you get started – as well as various tips and guides. For example, check out the latest Bet365 offers at freebets.org.uk!