Ready for Soccer

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and as such, bettors around the globe will be looking to place their money on the games. During the World Cup is when action runs at its highest point, but you can find games all throughout the year somewhere if you look. The major sports books have action on U.S. and European games, but if you want other areas of the world, you might have to look a bit harder to find an online book that covers your teams of choice.
Take on Soccer
The sport of soccer is mainly bet using a money line, just like in baseball. But instead of a 10 cent line, you’ll mainly be looking at a 20 cent line. For example, the money line will look like +145/-165. The difference here is 20 dollars more in favor of the casino or book making more money on favorites. And if the two teams are evenly matched, you won’t see both teams at -110, but rather, they will both be around -120. These are rough guidelines, but they are the generally accepted betting patterns that books use before they start moving the line around to accommodate for action. It’s not uncommon to see the line be much more than 20 cents different. Depending on how popular one team is, the above example might even move to +125/-225.

Soccer has a lot of prop bets and a lot of in-game betting that can be quite popular. You can find bets on which team will score first, and sometimes you can even find an alternate line on a game that’s already posted. This variety of bets will rarely be beneficial to you, but that is the nature of sports betting in general. There are a lot of bad bets out there designed to separate you from your money, so if you want to be successful, you will have a lot of sorting through the chaff to get to the wheat.

Amidst all the bad bets, you will find one or two good ones. These you will want to take full advantage of. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in betting to make money, and not just as a fun pastime, so you need to realize that even if you think a team will win, it might not be a good bet to give them action. For example, if a team is a heavy favorite at -225, you need to make sure that their chances of winning are high enough to warrant paying out $225 to win just $100. In this scenario, the team must be able to win almost 69.5 percent of the time for this bet to be profitable. If they are only 65 percent favorites, you will lose money on such a proposition over the long run.
Bet on the Champions League
This brings us back to the crux of sports betting. You need to either be able to handicap and quantify advantages with accuracy, or you need to have a good source that will deliver to you a true line, unbiased by fan money. Being a good soccer bettor takes more than just being able to pick a favorite; you’ll also need to be able to tell how often that favorite will win. If you’re looking at a game like Italy versus Mexico, you could correctly assume that Italy has the advantage, but if you’re wrong about how often they would actually win, you could be picking winners, but still losing money, and this completely defeats the point of betting to win money. Find the true line, and then look for weaknesses at your sportsbook of choice so you can find the overlays that will earn you money.