So, you’ve decided to get into sports betting and likely Google’d the best way to make money from wagering money on sports and you ended up here. Good choice. Because you’re here, let me show you the light in regards to bonuses and sports betting.
But first, when it comes to sports you can bet on, there are a lot to choose from. All of them at some point during the year offer a nice variety of betting lines.
However, there is one that you should definitely choose: Baseball.
And more specifically: Major League Baseball, especially if you’re looking into taking advantage of a bonus or promotion at a USA online sportsbook.
Why Bonuses Are Important For Being A Profitable Baseball Sports Bettor
After you’ve signed up at any of the online sportsbooks we recommend, it’s time to make your first deposit and you see that the betting site you’ve chosen is offering to match your initial deposit by a certain percentage up to a specific amount with a “Welcome Bonus.”
This is a great way to add a sizeable dollar amount to your starting bankroll, which will allow you to wager more money while maintaining the same percentage of your bankroll that you should stick to on a per-wager basis.
One thing to note is that pretty much all bonuses and promotions that add money to your account come with what’s called a “rollover requirement.”
This essentially equates to the amount of money you will need to wager before requesting a payout.
Whether you win or lose doesn’t matter since the only thing that satisfies the requirement is the amount of money that is put into action and is considered is “at-risk” which means it has the potential to be won or lost.
Rollover Requirements
While all sportsbooks have different bonuses and rollover requirements, here’s a general example:
- Bonus: 50% up to $1,000 with 10x rollover
- You deposit $100 and apply the welcome bonus
- You get an extra $50 added to your $100 deposit = $150
- With a 10x rollover, you take the deposit + bonus and multiply the rollover
- Withdrawal Requirement: $150 x 10 = $1,500
So to request a withdrawal, you will need to have wagered a total of $1,500 in the above example.
But back to the topic at hand, what does this have to do with baseball betting? Well, here are the 5 reasons why baseball should be your sport of choice and how it can help you meet those rollover requirements quickly and increase the likelihood that you have a profit once it’s met.
Top 5 Reasons To Bet On Baseball Games
- The number of games - During the MLB regular season, there are 162 games played by each of the 30 teams. This means there will be a staggering 2,430 games that you can bet money on and that doesn’t include postseason play or even the college game, where each team plays roughly 56 games before the CWS. When compared to the NFL regular season (256 total games) it’s easy to see that baseball gives you nearly 10 times the betting opportunities of football, meaning that rollover requirement can be met much, much faster.
- Season length - This is another area where the MLB is far more favorable to bettors when compared to the NFL. One season (regular and postseason) in MLB lasts from the end of March/beginning of April to end of October or roughly over 7 months. The NFL season lasts from the beginning of September to the Super Bowl on the first day in February, which means you only have 5 months to bet on pro football. That difference of 2 months is huge since football bettors have a much smaller window to bet on games and actually end up not betting more often than they are. Not the case with baseball.
- Available action - As if you needed another reason to convince you to bet on baseball over football, but here’s another one anyway: Because MLB teams play around 25-27 days out of each month during the season and because teams don’t all have the same off days, baseball betting lines are available every single day during the regular season (excluding a couple of days for the All-star break). With the NFL, you get one game per week so once you place your wager, you’ll need to wait a week before you can see if your bet wins. With baseball, profit can be made tomorrow.
- More stats, more bets - It’s no secret that the game of baseball is perhaps the most stat-driven sport in the entire world, and if you’re a fan of player proposition “prop” bets, then baseball wagering is a dream come true. Pretty much every single batting, pitching, and fielding statistic has odds attached to them at the sportsbook. So if you’re looking to burn through that rollover even quicker, then put money on MLB team and player statistical props as well as the more traditional bet types.
- Recorded history - Lastly, the best thing you do to help improve your chances of maintaining a profit after meeting the rollover requirement is to gather as much statistical data that you can on the sport. And there’s arguably no sport that has a bigger sample size of data that you can collect than that of MLB. Professional baseball has been played for over a century and stats have been recorded dating back to the 1800s. These resources are readily available and free on the Internet, and if you have the time or programming skills already, then consider creating a projection model with python so you can feed millions of data points into your algorithm and find value on every wager online.
Conclusion
Look, I’ll level with you: I’m a diehard fan of both the NFL and college football and have found MLB to be rather boring to watch (don’t even get me started on college baseball) in recent years. Fortunately, because baseball is more of a numbers game than any sport, a game you wagered on won’t require your full attention 4 hours at a time if you do your research ahead of time. Many profitable baseball handicappers never watch the game and instead enjoy automated spreadsheets from scraped web pages a lot more because of the simple fact that it tells them more than the actual game being played on the diamond at any given moment.
Regardless of whether you take advantage of a sportsbook bonus, your goal should be to wager a small percentage of your bankroll on any given betting line (1-3%) so you don’t go “bankrupt” after one bad wager.
The goal is to minimize losses as much as possible so you can continue to learn from your mistake and become a more knowledgeable sports bettor while chipping away at the rollover require (if taking a bonus) so you can cash out quicker - and there’s no better way to do just that than to start betting on baseball.