How To Bet Football

If you are new to betting on football and are not sure how to bet football games, it pays to understand how football works and the types of bets involved. Always try to keep up to date with what’s happening in the game and on team news relating to tranfers, injuries and anything that may affect the team’s perfomance.

Here are some tips on how to bet football:

Bet on Asian Handicaps

Asian handicaps are where the bookmaker will give a headstart, usually expressed in goals or as fractions of goals, to the team which is perceived to be the less likely winner of a particular match.

They eliminate the possibility of a draw as the outcome, which means that bookmakers have to bet to smaller margins usually about 103 - 104%. This works out to an extra 3% more profit when compared to the 107% associated with the ‘win-draw-lose’ markets. Keep this in mind when deciding how to bet football games. After all betting on football is a numbers game.

Bet on unfashionable teams

Every season bookmarkers continually underestimate smaller clubs, prefering to accord short odds to the big guns like Manchester United and Celtic. Even when a small club is on a winning run, they will often receive long odds, which bear no reflection to their current league position or form. If you’re trying to decide how to bet football games, you’re best advised to rely on results rather than reputation.

Bet on lower division matches

Bookmakers rely on team news to set match odds as much as punters rely on the same information when deciding how to bet football games. And often they get this news from the same sources as the media. While it’s easy for them to get current, up-to-the-minute news on premiership teams, the same is not always true for the lower division teams.

What this means is that you may actually be able to get information on the lower division teams – usually from local papers rather than national papers - that may be a factor in deciding how a match is going to go before the bookmakers get it. And if you act quick and place your bet before the bookmakers have had the chance to change their odds based on this latest information, you might end up profiting from the news.

Avoid multiple bets

Multiple bets are one of the poorest value bets on offer in football. Not only do all your picks have to win for there to be a payout, theres also the little task of negotiate the bookmakers' margins a number of times. If you want to make money in the long term, you’re better off sticking to singles. Theres a reason why bookmarkers market multiples aggressively – its because chances of winning are very slim. So keep this in mind when deciding how to bet on football.

Opt to sell players’ goal minutes if spread betting

If you’re not sure asian handicaps are the right choice for you and are still trying to decide how to bet football games, you may want to try spread betting, which amongst other options, allows you to place a bet on the total minutes in which a player scores his goals with the option to buy or sell the bet.

With chances that a striker could score any number of times during a match and in the dying minutes for that matter, spread firms tend to set the market artificially high, hoping that you will play it safe and choose to buy rather than sell since you will know beforehand how much you’ll lose should your player fail to score. But in reality you’re more likely to make money by choosing to sell rather than buy.

The above tips along with some research on the teams involved should help you decide how to bet football games.

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