Sports betting offers excitement with every pitch and agony with every turnover. But for a novice gambler, understanding several of the terminology may be a barrier to getting in the game. Really, sports betting is easy, and with a little basic explanation a lot of the lexicon is conveniently understood. You will find basically four kinds of bets: sides, totals, futures, and props. We shall explain all of these as well as a bit more.

Side wagers are probably the most common sports bet. Side wagers, otherwise known as straight wagers, are bets in which you pick a team to win. Side wagers have two variables – the pointspread and also the moneyline. The pointspread will be the number of points either added to the underdog score or subtracted from the favorite to find out whether or not the bet wins or not. The moneyline describes how much a winning bet pays the victor.

Sports like baseball are played almost exclusively on the moneyline. In other words, the pointspread is assumed to be zero. Many sportsbooks offer a runline, where the pointspread is 1.5 runs, meaning the favorite must win by two, not a single run. Soccer and hockey are usually highly reliant on the moneyline.

Football and basketball use the pointspread to great extent. Unlike baseball, the moneyline is usually fixed or only changes a little.

Total Wagers – Other than betting on a team to win or cover the spread, you can bet on the total number of points/runs/scores in a sporting event. The sportsbook sets a totals which is simply a number which they feel will generate bets over and under the total. If you bet over, you are betting that the sum of the competitors scores will be higher than the total. Nevertheless, if you bet under, you are betting fewer points are scored than the total.

Futures – Sides and totals are available for most conventional professional sports pitting Team A against Team B. But how does that work for golf tournaments or nascar races? Tennis matches can be bet with sides, but how about predicting a tournament champion? Or betting on the eventual super Bowl champion? Bets with more than 2 competitors are bet by futures. Each option has a moneyline linked to it to determine the payout – the longer the underdog the better the return. If you’re able to correctly pick a longshot — and win — even a small bet can pay off many times over.

Betting futures does have disadvantages. First of all, betting a future that takes quite a while to resolve causes the stake (the total amount you wagered) to be unavailable for many months. Additionally, futures usually either be longshots that pay out infrequently or favorites which have very little reward tempting you to place a sizable wager. Most of us like to have wishful thinking betting on your favorite team or players.

Props – For major sports events prop wagers are often available. Prop wagers are anything that isn’t going to fit in to the categories above. Consider props completely fun bets – the odds are usually awful and rarely any skill goes into the bet. The Superbowl on a yearly basis has hundreds of potential prop bets between the coin flip, to whether or not the game ends in overtime. Inbetween you bet on the teams and individual players. By way of example, the range of interceptions for the quarterback or the range of rushing yards for the running back.

Live Betting – Some advanced sportsbooks are now offering live in-game betting. They are really prop bets, advice here but considering that the bets have an extremely short duration (e.g. will a first down be the result of the next play) they need their very own category.

That should be all you will need to know for bet types as it covers all of the typical bets made in a sportsbook!