World Series Odds
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
In baseball, we are looking at a long season. As the season begins, spring has just officially started. By the time the season wraps up, winter is setting in. It’s a long haul for players and bettors alike. The length of the season is just one reason to make futures bets--it lasts forever. A futures wager is when you bet on something where the result lies months ahead in time. The most popular form of this type of betting is to pick which team will win the World Series.
These bets are available even before spring training kicks off. You can also make them throughout the season. But if you have a strong read on a team, you want to bet them early because by the time everyone else sees they’re good, the odds will be a lot lower than they were before. These bets can be made throughout the baseball season.
The book will list every team with their corresponding World Series odds. The odds are usually expressed in a fractional form. Here’s an example:
Odds to Win the World Series
Atlanta Braves 16/1
In the above example, Atlanta is 16/1 to win the World Series. That means for every $1 you bet, you win $16. Fractional odds expressions are pretty easy to understand. Sometimes you may see an odds expression like 13/2, or something along those lines, which is exactly the same as 6-and-a-half to 1.
Some Major League Baseball futures will have odds that are expressed on the money line. The money line is only slightly more difficult to understand. These odds are used in a lot of futures bets other than who will win the World Series. Let’s look at an example.
Odds to Win the NL Central Division
St. Louis Cardinals -175
Cincinnati Reds +375
Pittsburgh Pirates +375
Milwaukee Brewers +1400
Chicago Cubs +2500
Above you see five selections, all represented with a money line odds expression. The Cardinals are favored to win the division at -175. Whenever you see a minus-sign, that means you must bet that amount to win $100. Therefore, a $175 bet on the Cardinals would yield $100 in winnings if they win the division. The Reds and Pirates, for example, are +375. Whenever you see a plus-sign, that’s how much you win on a $100 bet. A $100 bet on the Reds or Bucs would pay off $375. The Cubs are the division longshot at +2500, meaning you win $2500 for every $100 you bet. Naturally, you don’t have to bet $100. You could bet as little as $2 and the odds would just break down proportionally.
Benefits in Baseball Futures Bets
The upside to futures bets are multifold. Look at it like this--most of the time when we bet on baseball, it is on one game. It lasts a few hours and then it’s over. A bet on which team will win the World Series lasts months. You get a ton of mileage on your wagering dollar. You can make a bet for as low as a couple bucks and then have a season-long stake on a team, where each result has an impact on your wager. In other words, it’s difficult to find another bet that gives you as much action as a World Series futures bet.
Again, the vast majority of baseball bets revolve around singular games. You isolate a game and pick a winner--simple enough. But when looking at baseball, a lot of our predictions pertain more to the “big picture.” When betting on a game in April, for example, it’s a small insignificant sliver of the big picture. When making a futures bet, you can focus more on a form of prediction that is more realistic--how a team will do over the course of an entire season.
During the course of a long baseball season, things even out. Teams catch good and bad breaks and the best ones rise to the top after a season of 162 games. When making futures bets, you insulate yourself from the issues that pop up when betting individual games. If an outfielder drops a fly ball in the sun, that can be murder to an individual bet. In a futures bet, you can better absorb things like that.
Futures, like betting on which team will win the World Series, allow you capitalize off times where you have an opinion that is very different than what most everyone else is thinking. It’s a way to capitalize off original insight. Sure, there have been a lot of favored teams who have won the World Series before, but a lot of past World Series Champions were not heavily-fancied before the season and would have fetched a heavy return on a bet.
Remember that a futures bet could take the better part of a year to unfold. When making these bets, make sure the book you’re doing business with is a solid outfit. A lot of futures bets were not cashed on account of the book going out of business by the time the bet comes to fruition and that is a painful thing to go through. Stick with the top shops such as 5Dimes or Bovada!
