Super Bowl Betting: The Right Approach
By Loot, NFL Football Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Note: If you came here with your sole intent to find out where you can place a Super Bowl bet online, here is your answer: Bovada Sportsbook.
For us bettors who try to take NFL betting seriously all season, Super Bowl Sunday presents some unique elements. It’s our final chance to cash in before the seemingly-eternal offseason. Naturally, we’d like to have a stake in the game. We just need to be careful to not fall in with the masses and become one of the reasons the books win so much at this time of the year.
If serious about NFL betting, we carefully select our wagers. We look for good-value spots throughout the season and hopefully, we’re being selective. Then comes the big game. Before, we had multiple games to choose from. We bet on some of them and the rest we left alone. In other words, you don’t even have to bet on the Super Bowl. That seems like the prudish move perhaps, but why just start betting for action at the end of the season? Why be calculating and painstaking for a whole season only to get all willy-nilly with our betting money at the end?
The Super Bowl is not typically the best betting game. During the regular season, there are about 15 games going on weekly. The bookie’s attention is spread over the whole schedule. In the playoffs, the lines become even tighter, with the bookie able to focus on a small handful of games. So when the Super Bowl rolls around, the game has the entirety of the bookie’s focus on it.
That means the lines are going to be tight as a drum. If we’re doing the right thing during the rest of the season, we are looking to put our money behind teams that are not being given enough credit by the bookies and oddsmakers. In the Super Bowl, we are battling ultra-tight lines when we bet sides or the over/under.
If we decide to start betting on props, a Super Bowl favorite, we are now subjecting ourselves to steep juice. It might be less when it’s a yea-or-nay prop, like a bet on whether something will happen or not, or a player vs. player prop. Then there are the props where you bet on a field of players, like which player will score the first touchdown. We should know better than to tangle with those types of bets.
This does not mean you should not bet on the Super Bowl, however. We always encourage bettors to find edges that exist off-the-grid. Not stats or other readily-identifiable information that the bookie knows about and accounts for, but other stuff. Maybe you just sense that beyond all the numbers and supposed advantages and disadvantages, there are other elements at play. Perhaps you sense a team is simply hungrier. Or a team is subtly peaking at just the right moment.
There are any number of little things that pop up to make you think one team will win or at least cover the spread. You see a quarterback playing with a little extra edge. The D-line has a little extra bounce. Perhaps the secondary is just dialed in. It could be something like a team just has a certain swagger that you think will manifest well in the big game. It doesn’t have to be something that can be ascertained in the stats or by looking at the match-ups. There are other more undefinable qualities that lie between the lines that can lead to you developing a strong opinion on who will win the game.
In addition, there is probably nothing wrong with letting it swing from the hip a tiny bit in the Super Bowl. This isn’t one of those weeks where you will be locked in your dungeon all Sunday pouring over NFL results with the rest of the world shut down around you. Usually, we are around people on Super Bowl Sunday. So there is nothing wrong with acting like a normal person one day out of the NFL betting season.
So if you want to make a long-shot prop bet or two, it probably won’t hurt. Sure, we wouldn’t be doing that during the rest of the season. And we should only bet a small amount. Never should we threaten our season-end bottom-line by being cavalier with our bankroll during the Super Bowl. That doesn’t mean we can’t bet and have a little fun with it. We just need to exercise due caution.
