People have been betting on sporting events for a very long time. Even people who do not consider themselves bettors will often bet a dollar against a friend on the Super Bowl. For many people betting on a game makes the game more exciting. But there are other reasons to bet on sports besides just entertainment.

Most kinds of gambling are purely for entertainment. In these games, you are guaranteed to lose in the long run because the odds are against you. The worst examples of these kinds of games are state lotteries where the average pay-back on a dollar bet can be as low as 33 cents. But even more reasonable gambling opportunities such as blackjack or craps fall into this category; you just have to play a little longer to lose all of your money.

Sports betting is different. Along with poker, sports betting is the only kind of gambling at which you are not guaranteed to lose in the long run. Why is this? Because when a sports bet is placed it is not placed against the house; it is placed against another gambler. The house is merely acting as an intermediate for two people who bet against each other (the house, of course, gets a cut of each bet for their service). In a game like blackjack you are betting directly against the house and so the odds are set up so that you will lose; it might take an hour or a day or even a week, but play long enough and you will lose. This is not the case with sports betting. If you are an excellent handicapper or poker player you will win in the long run.

In this introduction we will discuss mostly sports betting with football and basketball because these are the sports which Davler Sports specializes in. But it turns out that this is convenient because these are two of the simplest sports to bet on.

There are an almost unlimited number of ways to bet (and we will discuss some of these later) but there are two popular bets which we will focus on. The first is called a "side" bet. This is a bet in which you try to predict who will win a game. It's called a side bet because you bet on one side or the other. The second kind of bet is called a "total" bet and with it you bet whether the two teams will score over or under a certain number of points (as set by the house). These bets are often referred to as over/under bets.

In the old days side bets worked differently than they do now. Then, odds where given for how likely it was that one team would beat another team. If you bet on a weak team and they won, you would win more than you bet. If you bet on a strong team and they won, you would win less than you bet. This is the same way horse racing works today. The problem with this kind of betting is that some teams are so much weaker than other teams that they will never win a game straight up (this is never the case in professional sports but it is quite common in college).

But now, the situation has changed for the better. Bets are placed against the spread. The spread is the number of points that the odds makers (the house) believe a team will win by. For example, a game will generally be listed as follows (this is taken from an NBA game).

001 CHICAGO 13.5

002 PHILADELPHIA

Over/Under 210.0o/u

In the first column is listed the number of the game. This is the official Las Vegas rotation and it is used when placing bets so as to minimize the possibility of someone betting on the wrong game. (Generally a bet will be placed as, "$50 on 002, Philadelphia to win." This eliminates all possibility of mistake.)

Next is listed the team name. Finally is listed the line after the team which is favored. In this case the team is Chicago. Chicago is favored by 13.5 points. This means that if you bet on Chicago, they must win by more than 13.5 points in order for you to win the bet. (Often the line will be reported as simply "Chicago -13.5" which means the game starts at Philadelphia 0, Chicago -13.5.) If Chicago does not win by more the 13.5 points then you lose because Chicago did not cover the spread or win against the spread (even if they won the game).