Remember the old days of video games, when you could type in certain passwords or press a specific combination of buttons and break the game? Most of us had weathered pieces of paper covered in cheat codes and passwords that made the game easier.
Sports betting has its own set of special cheat codes, tips and tricks that make successful betting as easy as beating a video game with infinite health and unlimited ammo. Baseball betting is particularly vulnerable to these betting hacks. Bets on baseball involve complex handicapping, with divisional rivals competing at least 19 times a year, and intra-league play featuring teams that rarely go head-to-head.
It’s a long season in which even the best teams produce a volatile string of results – long enough that a team struggling at the All-Star Break can come back to win it all in October. This post contains eight tricks to help you improve your wins on MLB bets while also saving time in the process.
Trick #1. Use a Flat Wagering System & Avoid Parlays & Teasers
Following these two rules of thumb will put you pretty much in line with good baseball betting bankroll strategy. Don’t stress too much about how much to bet, just select a unit bet at the beginning of the season based on your budget and stick to it.
As for parlays and tears, it’s a good idea to stay away from prop bets
altogether. The return you get on a prop bet like a parlay doesn’t justify the longer odds, so the break-even point for these bets is actually higher than with straight-up sports wagers. That means you’d actually need to win more parlays to be profitable than run line or moneyline bets.
Trick #2. Shop for Lines On-the-Fly
If you’ve read even a little bit of baseball betting advice, you’ve been told a dozen times to shop for the best lines, and you know all the reasons why.
The tip here is this – find a resource that lists a bunch of different odds and choose your bet based on that information. It will save you a lot of time.
Trick #3. Embrace Underdogs w/High Game Totals
For this trick, we combine two things often suggested by baseball betting advice writers. Yes, Major League Baseball is an underdog’s league, and there’s lots of reasons for that. It’s also true that you can use the game totals line to strategize a run line or money line bet in baseball.
I like to teach people to do both at once and focus on home underdogs in games with high totals. In each of the past five seasons, at least ten MLB teams have won often enough as home dogs to justify some serious consideration for your overall MLB betting strategy. The easiest way to identify a likely home underdog win is to look for games with totals lines of 9.5 or higher.
Home underdogs have a distinct advantage in high-scoring games. In 2021, more than 53% of home underdogs in this context won outright, which is a profitable system at -110 odds.
Trick #4. Become a Wind Expert
Here’s some quick science on the effect of wind on baseball betting, brought to you by Sports Trading Systems.
Since the 2005 season, baseball games played with average winds under 5 MPH saw an average run total of 8.73. When that wind speed averaged 16 MPH, just 11 MPH more, the average went up to 9.72, practically an entire run from a slight increase in winds.
At 21 MPH, which is just another 5 MPH, we had another run.
Watch forecasts, especially local weather forecasts in the city where a game will take place, and look out for winds, especially when they get up to 16 MPH or more on average. When that happens, you should almost always bet the over.
Trick #5. Get Comfortable with Pitching Splits
All pitching mounds are not created equal. Pitchers are more prone to road issues than hitters, due to the big impacts even slight differences in mound construction can have on pitcher’s stuff.
Learning to read and understand pitching splits can save you a lot of time digging deep into pitching stats. Certain pitchers and certain parks disagree – the opposite is also true, as some pitchers seem to excel at certain away fields.
The splits will tell you how the pitcher does at home vs. how he does in different parks around the league.
Trick #6. Think in Terms of Risk and Not Winnings
But if you’re not doing that already, you should consider reframing the way you think about your baseball wagers.
It’s natural to want to win $100 or some nice round number, but this can sometimes lead you to make bad bankroll decisions or at the very least to go outside of your normal financial routine.
Trick #7. Handicap Pitching with Just Two Stats
Want to handicap a pitching contest but only have ten minutes to do it?
Looking at just these two stats together can give you a more complete picture of a pitching duel without burning up hours of your day.
Trick #8. When in Doubt, Flip a Coin
I’m not proud to admit this, but there have been times where I thought myself into a corner and had absolutely no idea how to bet, so I feel back on the tried and true method of just going “whatever, it doesn’t matter” and flipping a coin to decide how to bet.
Who is to say the coin flip couldn’t have gone the other way, and then I’d look like some kind of sports betting genius. Sometimes leaving things up entirely to fate is as legitimate a strategy as spending hours grinding out statistical analyses.
Conclusion
The best sports bettors in the world work long hours and lean on decades of experience to achieve a win rate of 55%. In fact, winning 55% of all your bets would be a remarkable achievement.
Against standard odds of -110, bettors need to win 52.4% of the time to break even. Beating the MLB betting sites by 2.6% over the course of a year would be noteworthy. I mention that to highlight how hard it is to win sports bets and how much work goes in to those 55% success rates.
The eight tricks in this post will help you bet more like the guys that win 55% of the time and less like the great unwashed masses that make up the betting public.
