Best Sports Betting Tips For Beginners
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Canadian bettors, and sports bettors everywhere, should be able to bet in a safe, non-convoluted way.
Claim Sportsbook Betting Bonuses
As a Canadian sports bettor, the multitude of sportsbooks available to you will always work in your favour. Simply put, sportsbooks are competitive and are therefore willing to offer you a great deal – as a new player or otherwise. If there’s one piece of advice every sports bettor should know, it’s to take advantage of promotional offers.
The best sportsbook bonuses are usually welcome offers given to new players, with commonplace deals predominantly being ‘deposit matches’. When a book offers a ‘deposit match’ bonus, it’s usually a certain percentage up to a certain amount.
For example, let’s say ‘X Sportsbook’ is offering all new players a ‘50% deposit match bonus of up to $500’ on initial (meaning first-ever) deposits. If you were to deposit $250 you would receive $125 in bonus bets, whereas a maximum deposit of $500 would net $250 in bonus bets.
It’s important to note that if you were to initially deposit more than $500, you would still only receive a maximum of $250 in bonus bets – as that’s the specified limit. For those who may be wondering what ‘bonus bets’ are, they’re simply bet credits that can be used to place wagers on any sport.
The specification of ‘bonus bet’ is to remind players that you cannot withdraw these bonus amounts as real cash. For example, if you deposited $400 and received a $200 deposit match bonus, you cannot then withdraw $600 cash. The only way to turn bonus bets into real cash is to win a wager with them.
Deposit match bonuses are sometimes offered to existing users as well, but ongoing promotions for returning players can be any number of other incentives. One of those perks is called an ‘odds boost’, which gives you a larger payout on favourable betting markets.
For example, if a ‘Connor McDavid anytime goal’ markets boosts its odds from -110 (favourite) to +140 (underdog) as a part of a promotional special, you’re in line to win a significant amount more than you would have if the odds hadn’t been boosted.
In short, these bonuses are everywhere, and sportsbooks make them easy to find. Don’t be afraid to make an account with multiple books to take advantage of several offers at once. It’s completely legal, so long as you only make one account per book per person.
Go Line Shopping
Similarly to bonus hunting, finding value by line shopping is best done by having an account with multiple sportsbooks. That said, you don’t need to start off by signing up for 10 different books. Take your time, and build things up slowly until you’re feeling confident in your understanding of this concept.
The best way to think about line shopping is to simply think of it as price matching. People are always looking to get the best price on everything whether it be groceries, cars, or even vacations. Sports betting is no different as books will have similar odds; however, the slight variations are how you can ensure you’re maximizing every dollar you wager.
The last section spoke of ‘boosted odds’, and line shopping is a good way to boost them on your own terms by finding discrepancies amongst different books. For example, say you want to place a futures bet on the Edmonton Oilers to win the Stanley Cup. ‘Book A’ has that wager at +500 odds, ‘Book B’ has it at +520, and ‘Book C’ has it at +550.
It may not seem like much of a difference, and in a vacuum, it isn’t. To show the difference it can make, let’s say you have $50 you’d like to bet on this market. A winning bet with Book A at +500 would return $300, Book B would payout $310, and Book C would earn you $325.
As you can see, the gap is subtle, but why settle for a $300 payout when it could be $325? All because you took a bit of time to find the book with the best odds. As mentioned before, you don’t need to have an account with a crazy number of books.
The above example involves using just three, and you never know when a book might make a mistake, which is easy to identify when you’re shopping (comparing) odds against the field.
Watch The News
This last tip may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people place poor bets because they simply couldn’t be bothered to look at context. The first reason to watch the news is due to injuries. Books will often refund single bets affected by a late injury announcement prior to game time, but it can really mess up a multi-leg parlay.
Another way injury news can help is by shedding some light on which teams may have a better chance to win than the odds indicate. For example, the Toronto Maple Leafs are favoured to win over the Montreal Canadiens, but late news comes out that the Leafs will be starting their backup goalie.
Sometimes, the odds won’t reflect this change right away, and you could then place a bet on the Canadiens to win as underdogs, even though the team’s chances of winning just greatly increased. It can sometimes be hard to take advantage of these brief windows, but watching platforms like ‘X’ for breaking news is a great way to potentially take advantage of inaccurate odds.
This advice works for player props as well. For example, if Auston Matthews is a late scratch for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Max Domi is promoted to the first power play unit, his chances of getting a point have skyrocketed. In these instances, don’t spend too much time line shopping, as submitting the bet before the odds change is the best way to strike while the iron’s hot.
We hope these tips will help you improve your sports betting game. Good luck!
