Make Your Enemy Your Friend

Theory and Strategy: Make your enemy your friend

People bet on sports for a variety of reasons.  Professional bettors make their mortgage payments with action on a wide variety of sports utilizing spread bets and over/unders etc. Recreational bettors like to have action, usually involving games of interest to them, whether it be games on tv or backing their favorite teams. 

Often times, these recreational bettors have teams they don’t like for one reason or another. Whereas professionals don’t care about teams (they bet numbers, not teams), the average Joe typically has a team they love to see lose. This is the basis for this article: Bet for the team you don’t like.  A little extra cash in your wallet helps ease the pain. 

There are several ways to illustrate this. We’ll look at football for illustration purposes, although it is important to know how this theory can change from sport to sport, and for what you’re “desired” outcome is. 

Let’s pick a team, say, the New England Patriots, for example. If you can’t stand seeing them win, or they always beat your favorite team when it matters most, place a futures Super Bowl bet on them. Or two. Maybe just the thought of this makes you cringe.  Obviously you want the _____________ (insert rival team here) to lose. In this case, the Patriots. There are typically two good times to do this, with a caveat third. The first is preseason. With a lot of uncertainty for a new season, this will be a good chance to get in before the odds get shorter. Remember, we want to maximize our return should they win it all.  The second good time to get in on a team is when they lose. The odds inevitably get longer with each loss. 

Finally, when a key player gets injured, the odds move and it may be time to place your action.  About five years ago, Ohio State was one of the top picks to win the national championship in the preseason. You could find them around 4:1. If you don’t like Ohio State, 4x your money may seem somewhat comforting to endure a Buckeye National Championship. In a summer practice, Big 10 offensive player of the year Braxton Miller got injured. When the report came out that he wouldn’t play that season, Ohio State went from 4:1 to 50:1. What’s more, they lost a game early in the year to Virginia Tech, who was dreadful the remainder of the year and the odds increased. We all know the result. Ohio State never looked back and routed Wisconsin for the Big 10 Championship, Beat top ranked Alabama, and housed Oregon to win it all. 

If you are anti-New England or anti-Ohio State or anti-__________(insert rival team here) consider placing action FOR them, not against. Your pocketbook will thank you should you have to watch them hoist the trophy. 

One other note: consider two identical tickets. That way when those teams make their run, you can put one for sale on PropSwap and lock in a profit while keeping the other for additional upside. 

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