Wednesday, 8 February 2012
As the interest in betting on NFL games continues to increase at online sportsbooks, so too do the variety and number of NFL props.
Proposition betting are those in which a wager is made that does not depend on the result of a single game. In fact, for decades, the single most popular regularly-offered proposition bet has been the “Who Will Win the Super Bowl?” market available basically from the end of the preceding season at every online sports betting site.
Lots of other Super Bowl proposition bets became wagering staples through the years, including the inexplicably popular “result of the coin flip” throwaway bet and the tantalizing “Will either team score a safety in the game?” prop offered by many bookmakers. Today, such lines are offered on every game every Sunday.
One favorite prop for NFL games is “Which team will score first?” Here, some advise when considering making this bet to give more weight to the underdogs, particularly if they’re at home. The thinking goes that the field of punters will be heavily backing the favorite and thus the odds on this prop get skewed quickly, but common sense will tell you that a top-flight offense simply scores on *any* possession more often and thus almost always has the odds in this prop bet in its favor.
You can estimate an average moneyline for any game with a bit of mathematics. Look at the pointspread and over/under offerings for the first half at a given sportsbook. If the Philadelphia Eagles are a three-point underdog at the New England Patriots with an over/under of 23 points, that makes an expected first-half score of New England, 13-10.
The moneyline offered by the bookmaker should be about equal to:
(expected score of favorite / expected score of underdog) x 100
If your numbers (double-check them!) are off by even more than +10 or -10, the “Who will score first?” prop could be a steal in the making for the sharp-eyed punter.
