No matter the sport, every team or player faces downtime, which usually has some effect on the sports betting lines. Despite this underlining fact, downtime affects different sports in different ways, making it of enormous importance to learn how to deal with downtimes in different sporting leagues, especially in regards to what you should do and the mistakes one should avoid at all costs.
Understanding the Impact of Downtime in Sports Betting
Understanding Downtime in Sports Betting
The concept of downtime is loosely used in sports betting to refer to instances when teams or players have to take a mandatory rest (like the bye week in the NFL and college football) or some earned rest (like sweeping a playoff opponent in the best-of-seven NBA/NHL series thus according you more time to rest than opponent that finishes a series in 5, 6 or 7 games).
In the examples of bye weeks, teams and players are affected differently. For instance, a team coming off a bye is likely to play more energetically than one that didn’t have any rest. The same often goes for teams that have had more rest after a series in the playoffs.
However, the effect of downtime is not usually positive in all cases. In horse racing, for instance, excessive rest between one race and another may mean the colt comes to a race out of shape or out of practice, leading to a lethargic performance. Also, there are those instances where a team was in poor form prior to a bye and nothing much has changed in the squad in terms of better coaching or practice, so the bye doesn’t necessarily lead to an improved play for them.
Applying Downtime in Sports Betting
With such a variance in effect of downtimes on different sports and leagues, it is extremely important that you understand how each downtime affects a team or a player on a case-to-case basis instead of generalizing your suppositions. Simply put, consider the amount of time that has passed between one game and the next one, how a team tends to respond to such downtimes (based on past betting trends and statistics), the type of sport or contest you intend to bet on, and method of betting or type of wager that you intend to make. By repeatedly studying trends and impacts of downtimes and their effects over a given time, you will soon find a formula or formulas that encourage sustainable success for you.
