It is no secret that sports gamblers love to plunk down their money on favorites. This is a natural betting tendency that is evidenced in seasoned and rookie baseball bettors alike. And in their defense, these gamblers can be forgiven for trusting too much on the favorites, considering the majority of the media and online sports betting pundits spend nearly every damn day of their professional lives hyping up the favored teams. And given that baseball is a moneyline sport, most bettors often find themselves backing favorites rather than underdogs.
Now, don’t get this wrong; betting on favorites in baseball can be profitable, but you will not always pick winners by jumping on favored teams. To ensure sustainable profitability in baseball lines, you must know when to back favorites and when to go for underdogs. In this article, we will highlight ways in which you can increase your chances of profitability in baseball favorite betting.
Understanding the Pro Baseball Favorites Betting System
Research on Your Favorites
The 2,430-game MLB regular season is an undeniably long and drawn out duration to back favorites. If you are all about favorites and you bet on one of every two games, it means you have to back 1,215 favorites the entire season, which is highly likely to lead to more losses than favorites. To become a sharp bettor, you need to know about teams, the strengths, weaknesses, best players, home/away splits and depth of the squads, among other factors. Once you have such details at your fingertips, you are highly likely to make good and well-informed betting decisions, hence encouraging profitability.
Keep Away from Heavy Favorites
When backing favorites of -150 or higher, you risk too much for a less payout, which can turn out to be costly for you if such favorites don’t get to win games. The unwritten rule about smart betting on favorites is that you should go for favorites of -120 or a cheaper price, allowing you to minimize your risks in case things don’t go your way.
Betting on Home and Road Favorites
Backing road favorites is can be great for business in baseball betting, given that the road favorites often come with a better value than they’d have otherwise had as favorites at home. The challenge, though, is that home underdogs tend to fight strongly, often leading to more wins for home underdogs than victories for the road favs. You can, however, beat this trend by going for road favorites who are coming off a loss in their previous game. Baseball betting history indicates that most road favorites (large or small) perform quite well when coming off a loss, supposedly due to the motivation of wanting to bounce back on the winning column. Data from Sports Insights supports this viewpoint, reporting that away favorites of -200 or more coming off a loss have gone 95-33 for a profit of $2,500 and a return of 9% on every dollar risked between 2004 and 2015.
As for home favorites, success is largely dependent on how the favored team approaches the game. For some, complacency tends to creep in, hence leading to upsets and disappointing performances. For others, being favored at home is a shot in the arm, often motivating the players to do well for in front of their home fans. Your baseball capping for home favorites should thus take into account records of how the home teams have performed in the past as favorites.
