I’m talking specifically about [something like this](http://statsandshots.com/freaking-out-rn/) where there are 20 games picked. Couldn’t you just pick 20 games in the first few weeks of the college football season when all of the really good teams play really crappy schools? Same goes for something like college basketball. What’s the catch?
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If the chance of team wins is super high, you wont get much when betting right. The big gains come from betting on teams that shouldn’t win but eventually still do. These betting companies are always the reall winner. They make sure that the chance that you lose times the amount of money you lose, is always higher than the chance you win times the amount you win.
The good team has to cover the spread. Look at the Iowa State UL Monroe game on the link. See how it says Iowa State -18.5? That means they have to win by more than 18.5 points for you to win that game, or you could bet UL Monroe and if they lose by 18 or less or win they’d win.
The spread makes betting on the game a coin toss. To toss a coin 20 times and have it come up heads every time is about a million to one.
It isn’t just predicting which team will win, it is predicting that a team will win when they are heavily expected to lose to a much better team, and then being right.
If I try to bet you that the sun will come up tomorrow, you aren’t going to take that bet. But if I bet you that instead of the sun, a giant wheel of cheese will rise in the morning, you’ll take that bet and give me great odds, since you are pretty sure it’s not going to happen.
> Couldn’t you just pick 20 games in the first few weeks of the college football season when all of the really good teams play really crappy schools?
You could but the betting odds wouldn’t be as good.
I dabble in sports betting. You might notice some numbers, either + or -, next to many of the bets. That means that the team listed either gets those points added to their score (+7) or gets that many points removed from their score (-7). In that way, you can have an even matchup for a game like Morgan State vs Army. Morgan State got 49.5 extra points but they didn’t lose by more than 49.5, so if you bet on Morgan State with the points you would have won. You probably could have bet on Army to straight up win that game, but you would have probably had to have bet tens of thousands of dollars just to win $100. On the other hand, you could have bet on Morgan State to win straight up (just win the game) and a $100 bet would have probably returned tens of thousands of dollars.
With a parlay, you’re stringing a lot of bets together. I usually only bet 4-5 teams max on a parlay but this person only bet 89 cents on what would lose probably 699,999 out of 700,000 times. They need the Redskins to win tonight or they lose their 89 cents. If the Redskins win, they’ll win just short of half a million dollars.
even if the individual event is very likely 20 of them in a row is not. The odds of rolling a 1-5 on a die 20 times in a row is about 2.6%
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I’m sorry to be rude, but this is kind of a silly question. Payouts are based primarily on probability (technically paid so that both betting sides are even) but basically the more likely it is, the lower the payout is. I mean surely you would have guessed this?
The bets are not for the crazy good team to win against the crazy bad team, the bets are for the crazy good team to win by +X over the bad team. Alabama will crush Southern Mississippi 95% of the time, but they aren’t good enough to crush them by 38 points every single time.
Point spreads are made to try to get the odds to be 50/50, so your link isn’t describing a bet of 20 instances of good teams over bad teams, but more like flipping the coin 20 times and getting heads 20 straight times….it is very hard.
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