How to Win Your First Sports Wager

Winning your first sports wager is always good, but the truth is that it’s just a simple matter of mathematics and odds. If you make point spread wagers, you have a 93.75% chance of winning at least one of your first four wagers if you just flip a coin for each game.

But if you want to improve your chances, there are some things you can do. Here are four things you can do to improve your chances of winning your first sports wager. Some of them are easier than others, but only one requires more than a minimal amount of effort.

Find out more below, and start winning more of your sports bets today.

1 – Home Team Point Spread

Home teams win more than road teams, and the most common wager is a point spread wager. Look for a home team that’s listed with a point spread close to zero. This can be anywhere from -2 to +2. Place a wager on the home team.

The fact is that in the long run, you’re going to win somewhere close to half of your point spread wagers, so you have around a 50% chance of winning this wager. Don’t get caught up in the point spreads right now. Remember that you’re just trying to win your first wager.

You might be wondering why you wouldn’t pick a heavy favorite or a big underdog because of the large point spreads. The problem is that a heavy favorite can win the game while not covering the point spread, and a team getting a lot of points can get dominated.

Another option is to take a home team getting points, but you still want to find one closer to even odds than one getting a lot of points.

2 – Big Moneyline Favorite

Out of the four possibilities on this page about how to win your first sports wager, this is the one with the highest percentage chance to win. This doesn’t mean that it’s the safest wager, but it’s the one with the best chance to win a single sports bet.

Look at all of the moneyline listings for the schedule and find the two or three highest options. These are shown as the ones with the largest, or minus numbers.

Make a moneyline wager on the home team with the highest number with a negative. This is actually the lowest number because minus or negative numbers go lower the bigger the number appears to be.

In this case, place a bet on the moneyline on the home team listed at -400. The minus number shows how much you need to wager to win $100, but you don’t have to risk that much. In this case, wager $40 on the team. If you win the wager, you receive your $40 back and a win of $10, you get a total of $50 if there isn’t any juice.

This might seem like a great deal to risk, but the reason why the line is so big is because the team is a big favorite to win. This bet is going to win most of the time. It’s probably going to win at least 90% of the time. But the few times it loses, you end up losing a large amount. This is why it’s not the safest wager, but the one that’s most likely to win.

3 – Ride the Streak

Sports teams go on winning and losing streaks. Look at the teams that are currently on a winning or losing streak, then place a wager based on them continuing their streak.

It’s even better if you can find a game between a team on a winning streak and a team on a losing streak.

This is the type of thing you can use even after you learn how to handicap games. You’re going to learn more about handicapping in the next section.

The truth is that teams eventually break out of streaks, both losing and winning ones. But you never want to wager on the break out. You always want to wager on the streak continuing or skip the game.

Use the moneyline when you’re wagering on streaks because all you want to wager on is a win or a loss.

4 – Handicapping

The best way to win your first sports wager is to learn how to handicap games. You can practice handicapping games for as long as you want before placing a real money wager. In fact, you should spend at least a month if not longer practicing your handicapping before even thinking about placing your first wager.

Start looking at every game on the schedule and check out the lines. Then, see how good you can predict the outcomes of the games. Track your progress every day to see if you can learn what factors can influence games and how you can use these qualities to improve your future results.

If you want to wager on sports more than as a casual gambler, you need to learn as much as you can about how to handicap games. Handicapping is a skill you can learn, and it’s a skill that can be valuable over the course of your life.

Begin with your favorite sport and start collecting as much information and as many statistics as you can. Look at all of the stats and information for each game, and try to predict the final score. See if your prediction agrees with the lines, and try to figure out why there’s a difference.

As you track your predictions and the actual results, you can learn how to improve your predictions and learn how to identify when the sportsbooks produce weak lines. This is how you learn to make money handicapping sporting events.

Conclusion

The best option is to invest some time learning how to handicap sporting events. It gives you the best chance to win now and in the future.

But if you’re not patient enough to wait, you can pick a big moneyline favorite or just pick a home team using the point spread. The other option is to look for a streak or streaks and bet on the streak or streaks to continue.

Even if you decide for a quick and easy method to win your first sports wager, spend some time learning more about handicapping. It’s a skill that will pay profits for years to come.