At popular sportsbooks like Bovada, not only can you place pre-game wagers on all major sports leagues, but you can also place live wagers on the day’s slate of games. Live wagers provide exciting opportunities for bettors because the odds will shift during the course of a given game. The opportunities are there, however transitory they may be as the score changes rapidly; the question is how to take advantage of them.
Optimal Live Betting Strategy
One way to gain an edge is to know what you are looking for and to know what to expect. Let’s say that the Cavaliers are favored by two points against the Thunder. You think the Cavaliers will win the game, but you don’t want to invest in the money-line at the current price. Instead, you want to bet on the Cavaliers at plus odds. You can, during the game, wait for the Cavaliers to fall behind and, accordingly, for their live money-line odds to look sufficiently attractive to you. Indeed, the final score for a given game will often not reflect what happened in every phase in that game.
Look at the winner of any NBA game and see how often that team fell behind during the course of it. Using your preconceived expectations, you can thus gain an edge in real time by placing wagers at more attractive prices.
The key is to be decisive. If you see the Cavaliers falling behind, you have to resist the temptation to avoid betting on them. The temptation will exist in your mind because you will have just watched the Celtics outplay them. Recency bias is a powerful phenomenon that can disrupt your train of thought in that you can tell yourself that you will bet on the Cavs and then, because you’ll have just seen it, fail to wager on them. Good live-betting does involve mental discipline.
Another key part of being decisive is to not get greedy. You gain an edge in real time by not letting that edge slip away. In our hypothetical game between Cleveland and Boston where you want to bet on the Cavs, you can see the Celtics build their lead point by point. While watching the Celtics’ run, you’ll see the money-line odds for Cleveland look more and more attractive. It is tempting to wait for the Celtics to make just one more basket or two more baskets so that Cleveland’s odds become even more attractive.
But every so often, the team that you are getting ready to pounce on live will regain its footing sooner than you hoped it would and, as a result, the live odds will no longer be attractive. The key here is to realize and to accept that you will not always get the best number. Take what you can get. Take what you can be happy with.
Mental Preparation as a Handicapper
A further way to gain an edge in real time is to accept unexpected changes and, more generally speaking, to be ready to make mental adjustments. It is one thing to wager according to your expectations of how things will change, but it is also important to recognize what will not change. This point is especially relevant for unexpected injuries.
If you were expecting to bet on the Cavs but Donovan Mitchell gets hurt and if you think that Donovan Mitchell was going to play a decisive role in Cleveland’s victory, then you will have to accept that the Cavaliers will not fulfill your prior expectations. You will have to adjust to other unexpected things that will happen in a given game, too. Certain players might be having off-days.
A team might look deflated — perhaps because it is coming off a gut-wrenching loss. It might turn out that a given defender lacks the footspeed to contain an opposing player. Those are things that you learn from watching a given game that you could not have perceived before that game. So, you gain an edge in real time by being willing to watch and learn and to mentally be flexible.
