Quite often a person who wants to bet on basketball games opens the Newspaper or fires up the internet to find the daily line for today’s basketball games. From there, they scan the betting lines in search of value. While this method of game selection might produce favorable results from time to time, it is highly unlikely to be a profitable basketball betting method over the long haul. Instead, a basketball bettor should develop his own line to find value in the games being played.
Newspapers and the Internet provide a ton of information about college basketball games and teams. Not only does each provide a betting line, they also provide team statistics such as win-loss, over-under, conference records, records vs. ranked teams, average margin of victory and a whole lot more. Any statistic that one can think of is available on college basketball teams. Additionally, power rankings are available for college basketball teams. These power rankings take into consideration the strength of a college basketball team’s opposition, as well as the strength of the opposing team’s schedules, how each team performed when they were expected to win, how well they performed when it was anticipated they would lose, and even their margin of victory. Power rankings of this sort consider and analyze many stats that are relevant to assessing a team. Additionally, by consulting the power rankings, a person handicapping their own games is saved a ton of legwork.
When using the power rankings to handicap games for basketball betting, a bettor should look at multiple power ranking charts and utilize the average rating of the charts. On power ranking charts, a team is assigned a rating. This rating suggests the number of points the team should score. When setting a line, a bettor should take the average ranking score of each team and adjust for a home court advantage, which is typically around four points. For example, supposing North Carolina played at home against Duke. UNC’s average ranking might be 94, while Duke’s is 92. We add four points to UNC’s ranking and determine the Tar Heels should be a six-point favorite on their home court, so we write our line to reflect UNC -6 over Duke. We then compare our homemade line with that of the sports betting service we use. If the true line spots Duke six or fewer points, we find value in the line and bet it. However, if UNC is spotting Duke 6.5 or more points, there is no value in the line and we find another game to bet.