How to Use Arbitrage and Hedging in Sports Betting

Both are important concepts but serve different purposes in betting strategy. While hedging reduces your maximum potential profit, it guarantees profit or minimizes losses. The profitability depends on timing, odds movement, and proper calculation.

How to Hedge a Risk Free Bet

If you don’t end up needing the hedge or choosing to use it, no big deal. You utilize betting systems and betting units to help you work out how much of your bankroll to bet, and when. There are probably a lot of you here right now that are scrambling last-minute to try and place a hedge bet in to lock up some sort of profit. If that’s you, we hope you get things worked out and there probably still is time to at least lock up some of the profit.

Example 1: Basic Single Game Hedge

This main advantage of this is that you don’t tie up any more of your money than necessary in hedges. The main disadvantage is it requires a precisely-timed followup instead of being done in one go. If you’re someone who typically bets smaller amounts, some of the recommended bet sizes in this guide probably made your head spin. While you can leave this as is and hope the Dolphins pull it off, there is a way for you to lock up some profit. You went from betting $100 on a game to now having $10,100 riding on a single game. Our football tips are made by professionals, but this does not guarantee a profit for you.

You decide to place a $100 point spread bet on Team A to cover the spread of -3.5 points at -110 odds. This means that if Team A wins by four or more points, you will receive a payout of $190.91 ($100 bet + $90.91 profit). However, if Team B wins or loses by three points or less, you will lose your entire bet. Hedge betting is a key strategy applied by professional NBA bettors. Assume that you bet $100 on Cleveland to lift the NBA trophy at the opening odds of 7.50. A hedging calculator can help you identify both biased and unbiased hedging strategies any time hedging opportunities come up in whatever sport you’re betting on.

Teams

This may seem counter-intuitive at first, but when you sort it all out, the answer is pretty simple. Don’t hedge your bets on parlays if you want to maximize your profits! The alternative is reducing your risk and guaranteeing a smaller return. I know many bettors personally who succeeded in making insane amounts of profits with arbitrage or value betting on parlay bets. Yes, you should always hedge the last leg of a parlay bet if you want to take the guaranteed profits that have already accumulated.

• This makes it easy to choose popular combinations or get inspiration for your own multi-leg bet.
• If you hedge correctly, you don’t even have to watch a game if you don’t want to because you already know 100% that you’re going to win money.
• While the strategy is relatively straightforward, it’s critical to use a hedging calculator to guarantee yourself the maximum profit.
• Similarly, if you stand to make a loss from that parlay wager, you could hedge it to reduce the size of the loss.
• If you then add 8 more legs of leverage and a 100% profit boost, you can hedge these for a healthy profit…

We’ll disregard the fact that we think you’re crazy, but you went ahead and made this bet at 100 to 1. You decide to make the bet for $100 meaning that if the Dolphins are miraculously successful and win the Super Bowl, you will win $10,000. Sign up to one of our top-rated sports betting sites and play your pinup login bets today.

Another betting instance where you can bet a small amount of money to win a lot are parlays. A parlay, for those of you that are new to all of this, is a combination of individual bets all rolled into one super bet. Basically, to win your parlay, you need to win every single bet on that parlay. A parlay can be two or more bets, but you have to win every single bet to win. Because this is tougher to do, you will be rewarded well for it. But you could also look at the in-game odds and see if you can get a killer price on the other team.