NFL Betting Myths Demystified: Part 1

GamingZion reveals the betting myths that lay behind the unsuccessful scores of the bettors on the NFL matches.

It is not a secret that the NFL is one of the most widely broadcasted leagues in America. Every important game is shown in replay, many TV shows specialized in pro football make reports about the games so the viewers cannot escape the following of the big runs, the catches of the blocks of the week or other peculiarities related to the sport. The print media have also played an important role in the popularity of NFL. Well documented stories about almost every match are inevitable on the sports pages of any of the American newspapers. If we have this in mind than the numbers that most of the gambling news all around the world reported concerning the great amount of money that Americas wagered on the NFL matches should not surprise anyone.

• NFL bettors with considerable losses in the past
• Don’t play on the favorites
• The fix is just an excuse for an unsuccessful bet

But the story about NFL betting has another side that GamingZion would like to investigate. However attractive, a defeating fact for the average American bettors is that beside all the information that is available in the media about NFL, bettors on NFL lose more year after year. How is this possible? The answer is that most of the betting enthusiasts place their wagers according to some of the greatest myths about betting that we are about to reveal in our two part article concerning this issue.

The betting myth of the favorites

The statistics available on the websites of all the online sportsbooks in the US, show that the average American bettor is constantly inclined to put his money on the supposed favorites. How does his chain of thought go? First he analyzes the teams seeing which one is higher on the table. Then he looks for the statistics of the highest ranked players and sees the performances of their teams. However, what is well known to the pro handicappers is that in general the high quality of the league allows that the difference between the best and the worst player on a position is not that high, in fact there is not much difference in general. When a team of “worst players” is pretty motivated against a team of allegedly better ones, a “non-expected” result is more than probable.

By choosing to place your wager on an underdog you have a crucial element of the game strategy on your side. All NFL teams do everything in their power to win every match. So a team that leads in a match with small difference is always taking a risk to maintain the difference. The losing team on the other hand tries to score until the end. A bettor that relies on a favorite that is ahead but not covered with five or less minutes of the match is therefore in a serious trouble. In the end, recent surveys among bettors on the NFL shows there is practically no successful long term bettor that does not bet most of the time on the underdogs.

The “fix” as the greatest betting myth

The myth of the fix is present in every sport. NFL is not an exception. Conspiracy theories are constructed all the time. However, there are thousands of successful bettors worldwide and it would be impossible for all of them to earn a considerable amount of money if the games were not honest but fixed. For someone to fix a game two crucial conditions need to be satisfied. First the fix would need to involve key players form the teams and second the bet should bring a win that is above the payments the players regularly receive. However, as online gambling news in the US note, the wages of NFL players in the past 15 years have raised to incredible amounts. The most valuable players in the teams make millions every year and even double from marketing activities. In order to fix a match one needs to spend a fortune to involve such kind of player. And he would need not one but at least several in order to realize such a plan.

If a fixer is still on the idea to “direct” match, then he would need to make a big enough wager and to involve hundreds of bookmakers in his betting activity. However this won’t pass unnoticed by the bookmakers, when they see how much money is placed on one team only. This so called “unnatural money” can easily make them take the game off until they find the reasons. For the bookmakers the honest game in NFL is also important. Only under that assumption they can make their survival on the sports betting market.