By: Fabiola Grosshan
Submitted: 2010-08-23 05:45:39 | Word Count: 600
If you are an avid sports fan with a taste for gambling, then you should definitely give sports betting a try. Just as the name implies, sports betting involves betting money on various sporting events that allow wagering.
To start your sports betting adventure on the right foot, avoid the pitfall of assuming that finding sports picks that win is easy! Although at first glimpse sports betting may seem very easy, note that there is no such thing as a straightforward bet. It takes some effort to be successful at identifying and seizing fruitful sports bets, an effort that should be primarily oriented towards researching sports scores, wager-relevant statistics, sports odds and the movement of the betting lines.
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Each of these factors plays an important role in the overall economy and mechanics of sports betting, and therefore you shouldn’t neglect any of them when selecting your sports picks; however, in this article we will focus exclusively on sports odds.
First, the odds indicate whether the team or athlete you are wagering on is the favorite or the underdog in that particular sports clash. In addition to that, the odds provide you with the information needed to calculate how much you can win with a particular bet, thus allowing you to accurately weigh its value.
Outside the world of sports betting, odds are nothing more than the chances of a given event to occur at some point in time, and are commonly expressed in percentages. Sometimes, chances are easy to calculate – each time you flip a coin, you know you have a 50% chance to guess whether you get heads or tails. Similarly, each time you roll a six-sided dice, you know you have a 1 in 6 or 16.66% chance to predict the number that shows up. Other times though, chances are trickier to predict due to the higher number of variables involved.
In sports betting, odds are calculated differently from chances and can be expressed in three distinctive ways:
• Decimal odds – commonly used in countries all over Europe, except for the UK;
• Fractional odds – used particularly in the UK;
• Money line-dependent odds or the popular “Las Vegas odds” – mainly used in the US.
The process of converting common percentage chances to decimal odds involves applying the following formula: decimal odds = 100/ percentage chance.
For instance, if there was a 25% chance that your favorite football team won a derby match, using the provided formula you would get 100/20 = 4, where 4 represents the odds of your favorite team winning the confrontation. If you chose to bet it and the team emerged victorious, then you would receive €4 for every €1 invested in your bet.
Using the same example above, the resulting fractional odds would read 3/1, which means you have one chance out of three to win your chosen bet, and that for every £1 you wager you will win £3, plus your £1 wagered initially.
Las Vegas odds are basically a combination of decimal and fractional odds, but with the difference that they can be either positive or negative. With positive Vegas odds, the number specified next to the “+” sign represents how much money you will win for every $100 you wager. By contrast, in the case of negative Vegas odds, the number specified next to the “-“ sign shows the amount you have to bet in order to win $100.
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For more resources about Vegas odds or about Las Vegas odds or even about scores, please review these links.
