This is a guest post by Steve Conway: techie, adrenaline junkie and sports buff.
steveconway00@gmail.com
For sports fans, the games are already exciting enough. But one way of making them even more exciting is to bet on them. If you are already familiar with the NFL and how it works, you shouldn’t find betting too complicated. If this is all new to you, there are some things you need to know.
Use Your Head, Not Your Heart
One of the golden rules of gambling is always to follow your head and not your heart—gamblers who allow emotion to cloud their decision making are the ones who end up losing all their money.
Don’t base your gambling decisions on the team that you support or who you want to win. Instead, rely purely on the cold hard data available to you when making your betting decisions. The more you can leave emotion out of it, the more you can trust your betting decisions.
Take Note of the Location
It is all too easy to underappreciate the difference that the home advantage can make. Any team that is playing on their home turf has a distinct advantage. Some NFL teams seem to fare better than others when playing away from home. Before you place a bet on any specific team, it is worth checking what their home and away records are like.
The easiest way of maximizing the returns on your bets is to check the home and away statistics for the team you plan to bet on. Understanding where teams have played in the past and where their successes and failures lie can tell you a lot about their future performance.
Learn About Individual Matchups
There will always be some teams that stand head and shoulders above the others in any given sport. However, there are often specific one-on-one matchups that reveal weaknesses in otherwise strong teams.
Learning the individual matchups and how teams tend to perform against one another is invaluable for anyone who wants to start betting on NFL games. Looking at the raw numbers and statistics can certainly be useful. But some individual matchups entirely defy the usual rules of the sport. Being aware of this is always a real boon for anyone who wants to get into NFL betting.
Use Computer Picks
If you aren’t confident in your ability to pick out the key NFL players and teams on your own, you can use a website like Odds Shark to find NFL Predictions. This is an invaluable resource for identifying viable bets for people who don’t have the pre-requisite knowledge. Using automated betting or computer picks can also give you the space you need to learn how betting on NFL games works. Ultimately, you might come out of it in a better position than you started.
Betting on your first NFL game is a big step. If you don’t have any previous experience gambling, it can be a confusing world to break into. However, as long as you do your homework and research how NFL betting works, you can give yourself the best possible chance of success. Keep the four tips above in mind every time you bet on an NFL game.