Each week I chat with a few of our clerks about what we can do better or what the biggest issues are for clients. As you all know, the standard payoff on a football pointspread is 10/11 (or –110) but occasionally books deviate from that. Anything other than –110 is referred to as an ‘off-standard’ line and it is standard practice for football.
Read More . . .After a great first week of football, I thought it would be important to explain line moves from the House’s point-of-view in detail. Much of this comes from a similar article I wrote last football season, but I think it is important enough for bettors to understand how a sportsbook operates that I will publish it every year!
Read More . . .Did you stay up until 5am ET (or get up) to watch the first football game of the year live from Tokyo last weekend? I promised myself (and my wife) I wouldn’t, and so I went to bed at a normal time, but somehow I woke up at 4:45am ET for no reason whatsoever. I looked at the clock and my heart started racing.
Read More . . .Every day, I spend at least a few minutes listening to the tape recordings of calls placed in our call center. I was surprised last week when a couple of those calls involved bettors that didn’t seem to understand the workings of Listed Pitchers. This is also a regular comment from our clerks. I’ve often said baseball provides more advantage for sports bettors than any other sport. Lower juice is part of that advantage but Listed Pitchers are a big part as well.
Read More . . .I am writing this column, as the game is in progress, so post-game reactions will not enter into my thinking. What I can tell you is how the new format has affected betting, and that is the main topic for today’s article.
Read More . . .Now that all of the Interleague games are over for this baseball season (except of course for the All Star Game and World Series and the one rain-out to be made up in September) I want to recap the results for you a little bit. I will also give a quick recap of the NHL season and the NBA Finals (sorry for the delay).
Read More . . .As the Spurs and Nets get set to battle for the NBA Championship, I thought this would be a great time to recap the NBA action so far this season. This playoff season has been a pretty good one for books but there have been a few strange trends that I will share with you. With no NBA games for a few days I had time to crunch some of the numbers. Hopefully you can benefit a little from what you read here.
Read More . . .In the last issue, we covered the math involved in betting moneylines. This week I want to follow up with an explanation of runlines and a little information on how the two line types compare. Again, some of this material was in a similar column last year but I feel it is important enough to roll out every year.
Read More . . .I’ll be honest, I wrote most of this column a year or so ago. However, I have been getting emails with follow up questions for the entire year so obviously some readers found the material useful. I’ve updated it and included the moneyline conversion chart. In my next column I will try to cover some of the follow up topics as well. If you are new to betting baseball, or have never tried moneylines in football or basketball, this is a great column for you.
Read More . . .All right, enough about hoops - lets talk baseball. Hard to believe we are already three weeks into another season. I am a big baseball fan so I will be writing about it a fair amount this summer so here is a primer to get us started.
Read More . . .It has truly been a mad, mad month. With media coverage and water cooler chat focused on both the war in Iraq (and rightly so) and the outbreak of SARS, I think March Madness provided a much-needed dose of old-fashioned entertainment. It was so nice to have an alternative to both the news and the spate of awful reality TV shows that it makes me want to scream “Thank God for college basketball!”
Read More . . .I admit that it is strange to write a golf column in the middle of March Madness but with the hype that The Masters will be getting in the next couple of weeks thanks to <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/golfonline/news/2003/03/12/burk_masters_ap/">Martha Burk</a> and Hootie Johnson, I just couldn’t resist.
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