NCAA Betting

With its notorious March Madness, NCAA basketball is certainly one of the more popular sports from a sports bettor’s point of view.

The same basic rules apply to NCAA betting, as to all other forms of sports betting. Do no bet with the crowd and try to locate hidden value.

We’ve explained on other pages of this site, how hidden value can be located. Let’s now see how it comes into existence in the first-place.

Whenever a favorite plays against a home underdog, statistics have shown that the crowd will always side with the fav, in the way the bets are made. That means, the balance that the bookmaker is striving for will be upset.

He’ll have too many bettors on one side of the bet, and what’s more dangerous for him, they’ll be on the side of the favorite. In case the favorite wins indeed, this setup could spell disaster for the sportsbook. He needs to do something to make the other side more attractive for bettors, so he changes his lines, making it a much better deal to bet on the dog.

This will hopefully balance the action, and this is exactly where the uncovered value slips in. The bookmakers knows all too well that there’s value there he’s giving up on, but he does it nonetheless in order to balance the big picture again.

Sometimes the lack of balance is so obvious, the sportbook itself goes up against the crowd of squares, covering their bets, without switching the line around.