For most of you reading this, it’s your first stop on your learning journey to becoming a successful sports bettor. If you didn’t navigate to this page from our beginner’s hub, we highly recommend navigating over to our strategy guide linked at the bottom of this page. It’s completely free and is the number-one resource on the web for training and building new and successful sports bettors.

Beginners Guide To Online Sports Betting
How To Do Sports Betting
Beginner's Guide To Sports Betting

Now that we’ve gotten the administrative stuff out of the way, let’s dive into some of the most important aspects of a solid sports betting foundation. These are the top 10 things that our expert bettors wish they would have been taught before they started betting on sports. These are the lessons they were forced to learn the hard (and expensive) way.

#1 – Don’t Force Betting Opportunities

We absolutely love people who are eager to win, who are go-getters, and who like to get out there and try and make something positive happen. However, this can cause you problems when it comes to sports betting. We constantly see new sports bettors who learn a few things, do some research, and then get out there and fire off a bet at every single game on the slate.

For most of you reading this, it’s your first stop on your learning journey to becoming a successful sports bettor. If you didn’t navigate to this page from our beginner’s hub, we highly recommend navigating over to our strategy guide linked at the bottom of this page. For most of you reading this, it’s your first stop on your learning journey to becoming a successful sports bettor. If you didn’t navigate to this page from our beginner’s hub, we highly recommend navigating over to our strategy guide linked at the bottom of this page.

Why? Well, they usually say that you can’t win what you don’t put in play. They feel that by betting more games, they are giving themselves a better opportunity to get rich quick and join the big leagues. While we respect their excitement and drive, this is the completely wrong way to approach sports betting.

Beginners Guide To Online Sports Betting

When you start trying to get action on every single game or every single type of bet out there, you’re setting yourself up for failure. And here’s a big point – not every game, match, or race is going to have value. This means that you’re going to be firing off on games where you’re, in effect, just gambling.

Here’s the takeaway. Do not bet every single game on the slate. Do not bet games where you aren’t sure you’re getting value if you win. We commend you for wanting to eagerly get out there and take over the world, but that’s the wrong approach. Sports betting is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and you need to approach it as such so you can learn to avoid these mistakes.

#2 – There Is No Such Thing as a Lock

If we had a nickel for every single time someone told us they had the “lock of the century,” and the team ended up losing, we would have an obnoxious amount of nickels. There’s no better way to say this than to be completely blunt. There is no such thing as a lock in sports betting.

We don’t care how great a team is or how terrible the line is; you are being paid out based on the percentage chance that bet has to happen. Even if something is 95% likely to happen, there is still a 5% chance that it’s not going to happen. And you’re most likely not getting paid anywhere close to even money for that bet, which means there may not be any value in the bet.

Too often, we see people betting large portions of their bankrolls on things that they claim to be locks. The problem is this. Sports are a wild and wacky thing where you never truly know what is going to happen. The only way that you could make a valid claim that something is a lock is if you could see into the future or if you were cheating and fixing games. If you’re a wizard, awesome; you don’t need our help. And we will go ahead and assume you aren’t fixing games.

The takeaway here is that you need to follow your rules you set out for yourself. Don’t inflate your bet sizes over what your personal bankroll rules state just because you’re convinced it is a lock. Sure, you can bet at the top of the range you set out for yourself, but do not go higher than that.

#3 – Never Chase Your Losses

If there is one tip on this list that you might have heard before, it would be this one. That being said, please don’t gloss over this, roll your eyes, and say, “Yeah, yeah, I get it.” It’s easy to say right now that you’re never going to chase your losses. Just like it’s easy to say you’re not going to have too many drinks at that wedding coming up. Or that you’re not going to spend too much money when you go to the grocery store.

Everything is easy to say you’ll do when you aren’t in the heat of the moment. But after that first cocktail goes down and the awkward family member starts talking to you, or you walk down the chips aisle at the grocery store and everything looks glorious, or you lose a few bets you were sure you were going to win, things change.

We are not saying you’re weak or that there is anything wrong with you. But you do need to realize that we are all human, and you’re going to be tempted to chase your losses. Here’s a quick scenario to tell you what this might look like in a real-world example.

Let’s say it’s college football Saturday, and you are pumped to have a winning day. You make five picks in the first slate of games for $50 apiece. Things go terribly. You somehow lose every single one and head into the afternoon slate down $250.

You had originally planned to bet four games at your normal $50 apiece. But that means if you win 100% of your afternoon games, you’re still going to end the day down $50. Does that sound appealing? Probably not.

Well, if you were a good sports bettor, you would accept that your sports betting career is not broken down into days or small sessions. You would bet the four games and start getting yourself prepped for Sunday’s NFL games or for next week’s college games.

But your human element starts to creep in. What if you just upped your bets to $75 a piece? Then, if you won all four, you’d end the day a winner. Or say there is a game that you think is almost a lock (those things that don’t really exist). What if you kept $50 on the other three games and decided to bet double on this game? That way, if you won all of your games, you’d at least leave even on the day minus the juice. Or what if you try and find a few more games to bet? You won’t be breaking your rules by raising your bet amount, right?

All of these are terrible ideas that sound terrible now but might sound a lot better in the moment. These are forms of chasing your losses and will do nothing but get you in trouble. You have to start viewing your sports betting as a long-term endeavor and learn how to do serious research. How much you win and lose is not calculated by where you are at the end of the day, but more where you are at the end of a month or a season or a year.

When you can get yourself away from thinking of betting in terms of short sessions, you’ll start to lose the urge to chase your losses. Ultimately, it’s going to come down to your self-discipline and your ability to keep the human element out of the equation. Just remember, the better you are at this, the better shot you have at being a long-term winner in the sports betting game.

#4 – You’re Theoretically NOT Betting Against the House

Who do you place your bets against when you sports bet? The house (the casino). But are you really betting against the house? Technically, yes. But theoretically, you are betting against the other sports bettors. This is important because for literally any other bet that you place against the house, the house will have the advantage. When this is the case, you mathematically have zero shot of ever turning a long-term profit.

You can’t be a professional roulette player. You can’t be a professional slots player. But you can be a professional sports bettor betting against the house. The reason is two-fold. First, there is a human element involved. When the sportsbook places their opening lines, they can be wrong. The casino can’t be wrong when they spin the roulette wheel because the math is fixed. With sports betting lines, though, someone has to pick the line. Yes, they use computers to help, but there is still a human element that is not perfect.

When you can find these errors, you can make money. The second reason that you can still be a professional sports bettor is that once the sportsbook puts out the initial line, the public controls how it moves. Based on how they c

Beginners Guide To Sports Betting