Much of the trick to beating the NFL football comes from smart betting, not handicapping. The prevailing belief amongst novice sports bettors is that all successful sports bettors have monstrous data bases, and thousands of spread sheets, through which they process and interpret game stats and other relevant information. True, there are many successful sports bettors who do this-however, it’s not a requisite for success. By learning to spot profitable bets, and bet combos, you can show a tidy profit at the end of the year without crunching a single number.

The fact is, all successful bettors have multiple “outs”. They don’t just open an account at one book and pray that that book will have the best line on a game that interests them. You should have multiple accounts opened up, and some money left over that you can toss into a book should you find a juicy line.

Remember: What we’re looking to do is accumulate small edges; picking up a nickel here, a dime there. To do this you need to be able to bet into the best lines possible. This is probably the most important section, once you understand how to compare point spreads to money lines you’ll find all kinds of opportunities to bet middles, reverse middles, and other odd combo bets for profit.

You can also find opportunities to scalp a money line against a point spread. For instance: say you find a game where the money line on the favorite is -150 at book ‘A’, while at book ‘B’ you can get the dog for +3.5 -110. If you do the math, you find that +3.5 -110 is the same as +160 on the money line. Anytime the odds you’re receiving on the dog are larger than the odds you’re laying on the favorite you have a profitable scalping opportunity.

In this case, assuming you have no opinion on the game, you expect the favorite to win by exactly 3 or less about 14% of the time. This means that 50% the favorite will win by 4 or more; when this happens you lose $ 10 which is the juice on the bet on the dog. 36% of the time you expect the dog to win outright; when this happens you’ll lose $50, since you win $100 on your dog bet but lose $150 on the money line bet on the favorite. But 14% of the time you’ll win both bets; i.e, the dog will cover and the favorite will win outright.

When this happens you win $200. Doing the math, we see that you expect to win $200 14% of the time, for a net win of $2800, lose $50 36% of the time for a loss of $1800, and lose $10 50% of the time for a loss of $500. This leaves you with a win of 2800- (1800+500), or $500, which equals an advantage of about 2.27% for every dollar you bet.

One of the reasons NFL betting has become so popular is that there are a number of ways that you can bet on a NFL game. These different bet range for low risk with low payouts while other bets offer high risk with high payouts. People love to bet on NFL, and the game lends itself so nicely to the average fan placing some money on their favorite team, or on a hunch.