Beat The Spread
Too bad a big bettor at BetMGM on Thursday didn't put it all on the Toronto Raptors' money line. But the win against the spread was very nice.
It's rare to see a six-figure bet come in on a random NBA regular season game in February, so a huge bet on Thursday afternoon should have been a sign to ride the Raptors over the Milwaukee Bucks.
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The point spread is a number set by oddsmakers to give bettors a chance to wager on either side of the game. Instead of making a moneyline bet where you would simply pick a winner, the point spread allows you to wager on how many points the favorite is going to win by or how many points the underdog can lose by and still cover the spread. User Name: Password.
One bettor in Vegas just put a $110,000 wager on the Raptors +7.5 đ°
Can they cover against Giannis and the Bucks? pic.twitter.com/buTh5Lgp4a
â BetMGM đŠ (@BetMGM) February 19, 2021It was the rare bet that wasn't even close to a sweat. The Raptors took a double-digit lead in the first half and the Bucks never threatened to come close to covering the 7.5-point spread or even winning outright.
It takes some courage to put down $110,000 on a Toronto team that was 13-15 coming in and on the road against one of the supposed best teams in the NBA, but it was the type of easy win we all dream of.
Raptors cruise to easy win
The Bucks have been floundering lately, so the 7.5 points with the Raptors looked enticing. The Raptors just beat the Bucks 124-113 on Tuesday in Milwaukee. While that didn't mean the Raptors were going to win two in a row at the Bucks, it certainly showed how poorly the Bucks have been playing. The Raptors have been pretty good after a very slow start to the season, as well.
The money line was +240 for Toronto, and that was never in doubt either.
Beat The Spread
When you see a big bet for a huge event, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a sharp play. Oftentimes, the biggest bets on the Super Bowl aren't made by professionals, but recreational sports bettors who want a lot of action on the big game. But when there's a big bet on a game that casual fans might not have even known was on the schedule, it probably isn't being made by a whale who came in from the high-limit tables looking for a basketball bet.
Whichever sharp bettor took the Raptors, he or she had a huge win without any worry at all. Not a bad Thursday night.
© Provided by Yahoo! Sports Fred VanVleet scores during the Raptors' win over the Bucks. (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)More from Yahoo Sports:
Everybody likes to cheer for the underdog, but hardly anyone bets on the underdog to win. We tend to put our money on the favorite most of the time. In fact, we bet on the favorite far more frequently than we should. To understand why, you have to understand some of the basic functions and malfunctions of human decision-making.
Filling out a winning March Madness bracket is difficult, but the process itself is simple. All you have to do is pick a winner for each game in your bracket. Most of the time, sports betting is more complicated than that. Itâs easy enough to pick the favorite to win, but what if we were to say the favorite has to win by at least eight points? And what if that eight-point spread were carefully crafted to make the game a toss-up â who would you pick then? This is the type of decision sports bettors have to make all the time.
Football Point Spread Betting
In 2004, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt identified the fact that point spreads arenât set like typical market prices, by equating relative levels of supply and demand. Instead, bookmakers set the margin to make the chance of the favorite covering the spread to be roughly 50 percent. Levitt speculated that bookmakers substantially improve their profits by biasing the spread very slightly against the favorite. This approach is profitable for bookmakers in part because, despite facing virtually even odds, people are much more likely to bet on the favorite than the underdog.
The question that Levittâs research left unaddressed is why people show such a strong bias towards favorites. As digital editor of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I come across many studies, and I found a compelling answer to this question in the research of Joseph Simmons, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvaniaâs Wharton School, and Leif Nelson, associate professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Simmons and Nelson say that peopleâs confidence in their own intuitions â regardless of whether that confidence is justified â guides their decision-making.
âWhen people decide how to bet on a game, first they identify who is going to win,â Nelson said. That decision is often fast and easy, particularly when teams are not evenly matched. âThe faster and easier it is, the less concerned they are with correcting that intuition when answering the more difficult question of whether the favorite is going to beat the point spread.â
For all but the most experienced bettor, determining whether the favorite will beat the spread is incredibly challenging. Keeping in mind that the spread is carefully calibrated to make the choice a virtual coin flip, people simply donât have much to go on besides their intuition. And because their intuition strongly suggests that the favorite will win, in the absence of information to the contrary it also tells them that the favorite will beat the spread. In a game between two fairly evenly matched teams, peopleâs feelings of confidence in the favorite to win are diminished, and theyâre much less likely to pick the favorite to cover the spread.
Simmons and Nelson analyzed betting data on 1,008 regular season NFL games on Sportsbook.com from 2009 to 2012. They found the average share of money bet on the favorite was 65 percent. This confirmed their initial study in which they tracked data from thousands of predictions of 850 professional and college football games on Yahoo.com for the 2003 and 2004 seasons. There Simmons and Nelson found, just as Levitt did, that even though favorites were about 50 percent likely to beat the spread (413 favorites beat the spread, 415 did not, and 22 were ties), people bet on the favorite more than two-thirds of the time. In fact, the more people believed a certain team would win, the more likely they were to also choose that team to beat the spread. Put another way, the confidence bettors felt in picking the winner translated into an unrelated belief that the winner would beat the spread.
Simmons and Nelson also ran a series of studies in a controlled laboratory setting. They made sure that people knew exactly what it meant to bet the spread. In addition to asking people who they thought would win the game and how confident they were in their choice, the researchers asked them to estimate the margin of victory. Remarkably, people continued to overwhelmingly bet that the favorite would cover the same spread they had just personally estimated. And, once again, the more confident people felt that a team would win, the more likely they were to bet that the team would beat the spread.
Astute gamblers may have noticed that although the bias towards favorites is a persistent one, it doesnât appear to cost people very much. If the point spread is calibrated to give favorites a 50 percent chance of beating it, then even if people bet on the favorite every time, they should win half their bets, just as they would if they always bet on the underdog or chose at random. In another paper, however, Simmons and Nelson, along with Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University and Shane Frederick of Yale University, found that favoritism towards favorites persists even when the playing field is tilted in favor of the underdog. People continued to show a bias toward picking favorites to cover the spread even when points were added to the spread dropping the favoritesâ odds below 50 percent. Even explicitly telling people that the spread was artificially inflated didnât stop them from making the costly error.
Luckily, as you scramble to fill out your March Madness bracket, you donât have to pick against spreads. You just have to pick who will win each game, something your intuition is pretty good at doing. So, in this case, go right ahead: Follow your gut and pick the favorites.