Hockey is a fast paced sport with a lot of action. However, a lot of teams are very evenly matched in the NHL, and this means that there are a lot of ties that occur. You might even find that a team can have upwards of 10 to 15 ties over the course of the regular 82 game season. For this reason, a lot of sportsbooks have what is called the puck line. Instead of a straight money line where one team pays more than another for the win, the puck line creates a spread of sorts, usually around half a goal. This makes betting more efficient for the sportsbooks and eliminates a lot of the wasted time of having a bet where no money is received or paid out. You can still find the money line bets, there are just more puck line bets than other types of choices. During the season, the puck line is where the majority of the action will take place.
When the season is over, you can still find a lot of different betting choices out there. One of the more popular bets is the Stanley Cup future. Here, you are given a list of all the teams in the NHL, and the payout odds of them winning the Stanley Cup are listed alongside. This can be really attractive, since even a big favorite, such as the defending champs, can pay out as high as +600. If you have strong feelings about which team will go all the way the next season, these futures bets can be really good for you, especially if your team of choice is not a big favorite. It’s not uncommon to find a +2500 payout or better. You can also find conference championship info on many sports books’ pages, as well as single player info, like MVP potentials.
Some sportsbooks will also have international hockey games up for betting too. The Winter Olympics is always popular, and you can sometimes make bets on these games a year or more before they begin. If you have a strong feeling on which country is going to win the gold, this can be good for you, but the downside is that your money will be tied up for longer periods of time. A $100 bet on Latvia to win Olympic gold might have a $40,000 payout, but what if you had made a large number of smaller bets in the year that your money was locked up? The 40 grand sure looks attractive, but if you were micro-betting over the course of an entire NHL season, you could quite easily surpass this number. Really, it’s a matter of personal preference over which approach you will want to make, but in most cases making more bets that payoff sooner will be more to your advantage.
Once the NHL season gets underway, you can also find in-game bets where you can follow the games live on television, and make a set of bets on what you think will happen short term for the games. For instance, you can bet on which team you think will make the next goal. These bets are harder to make because variance can be pretty high if you are just looking at small slices of a game, but to the devout hockey fan, live betting can be a really easy way to increase profits. As you will find, an approach that uses both long and short term approaches will be the most beneficial when it comes to making a little bit more extra money with your bets.