by Andreas-photography

My experiences with sports betting are somewhat limited, but I discovered that it was something I could get used to: a point-to-point horse race in a local town on a cold spring morning, gave me a taste for the sport as a spectator and to get involved in sports betting. But I found that somehow I need to overcome my natural instinct to support the underdog. At least in point-to-point, it’s extremely likely that the favourite will win.

There are three main types of bet in sports betting , the simplest being my earlier attempts with the single ‘win only’ bet. If your selection wins, you receive your stake back plus the same amount multiplied by the odds that you were offered (which would normally be expressed as a fraction) but there are a huge variety of bet types, and sporting events, that you can choose from.

If at the start of a new season, you want to make a bet based on a combination of different types of event, ‘doubles’ or ‘trebles’ or even ‘accumulators’ would be the bets for you. A double in sports betting would involve, for example, the combined odds of Colchester United winning the English Championship and Ronnie O’Sullivan winning the Snooker Premiership, the odds for each being obtained by multiplying the single odds (adding Colchester United win would make the outcome significantly more unlikely).

An ‘either way’ bet in sports betting involves a combination of possible outcomes: for a horse race you could bet on your favourite coming first, second or third, and this would be a combination of a ‘winning’ bet plus a ‘place bet’ for coming first, second or third (so you’d pay for two bets). The odds offered for a place would be lower than the odds of your horse winning; normally around a quarter (which would be advertised as ‘each way, 1,2,3′).

So if your horse came first, you’d receive a combination of the winnings for coming first and those for gaining a ‘place’. Either way bets vary in the rank that counts as getting ‘a place’ (normally it stretches as far as 3rd place, but if 4th place counted it would be listed as ‘each way quarter 1,2,3,4′).

In this area of sports betting, you can also bet on a horse, or player, losing, which would involve a simple reversal of the winning odds. If you’re up for a bigger challenge, there’s also spread betting; betting sites offer lots of information on what this entails.

A number of bookmakers now offer incentives for opening an online account with them.

Since it’s the beginning of the UK sports season, this is a good time to make the most of their sports betting offers: Premier League Snooker, Premiership football , the Women’s World Cup football and the Rugby Union World Cup are all either under way or about to begin, so there’s plenty to choose from. For each event, the stakes vary considerably, and will continue to change right up to (and during)the match, so it’s worth keeping an eye out as to what’s on offer.

One mayor betting company, for instance, will give you ten pounds for opening an account with a minum stake of ten pounds. The bonus must then be used in a ‘Win Only Single’ bet within a week of it entering your online sports betting account (which would happen once you’d staked your own balance).

This would mean, for instance, that you could decide to throw caution to the wind, and put your 10 pounds on Colchester to win the English Championship, at oddsof 80-1. You couldn’t, however, add any further credit to this amount but you could also use it on any ‘outright’ or ‘match only’ bet in any UK sporting event.

Another company has a similar offer for registering on their sports betting website, except you can bet less than 10 GBP, and have that amount matched as your bonus. Other companies offer free bets of up to 25 pounds when you register with them: similar restrictions apply, although some don’t seem to have time limits on when you take the offer up.

Like all things in life, you can have too much of a good thing, so perhaps I’ll need to exerpt a degree of caution in using my new-found sports betting knowledge. However, I fully intend to make the most of these introductory offers to find out if I have ‘beginners luck’.

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