Whether you’ve been around the sports betting game for a while, or are new and also have been following the advice found on this site, chances are you’ve been to sites like Covers.com while doing research on upcoming games. Chances are you’ve also noticed the little « consensus » tidbit next to each game, telling you which team the general public thinks will win. You could see that a team has a 70% popular opinion and feel like that may be a fairly good online football gambling agency bet for you to make. While nothing is ever certain worldwide of sports betting, this feeling will be incorrect.

One of the most important concepts to bear in mind when betting on sports is this: in the event the public won more than they lost, sports books would cease to exist. That is simplifying things just a little, simply, but usually that is a true statement. Casinos and sport books will be in business to make money–lots of money. Whenever they are losing money in a particular area, they will either change the guidelines or stop offering it entirely. Since the world of online sport books is alive and thriving, it really is then safe to assume that they’re making money and that, over time, the public loses their money.

I’ve been telling people to subscribe to the theory of reverse public opinion for years now. As is the case with a whole lot of the advice I have offered here at SportBooksReview, I’m not suggesting that men and women blindly bet against the team with higher public support every night–just keep it in mind when doing your investigation. You can find some situations where observing the public consensus and comparing it to line movement can be very eye-opening, and those are the situations in which you can pounce.

Since we discussed in our Line Movement article, there are a number of factors which could cause sport books to move the line. One particular factor is one team getting decidedly more income wagered on it than the other, creating a scenario where the books would lose a big amount of cash if one team wins. Books would prefer to have a good, even total amount bet on both sides of a game, so that regardless of which team wins, they’ll come out on top as a result of the juice (newbies: betting $110 to win $100, the $10 is the juice). This is why it is a good idea to take a quick peek at the consensus percentages in addition to the line movement for the games you want to bet on–there can sometimes be some very useful hidden information to give you one advantage.

When doing your research, if you happen to see a game where the public is extremely heavily betting on one team, say 70% or higher, yet the line did not move from it’s original number, in which case you have to ask yourself why that’s. If the public is betting most of their money on a team, though the books don’t move the number to attract betters for the additional team, then it’s telling you something. Either the books are confident that the general public will lose, or perhaps the big-money sharp betters have already made their bets on the additional team. In any event, this is an important red flag. Again, do not blindly bet your hard earned money on this strategy, but there will be situations where these numbers are too strong to ignore.

In general, I like fading the public–especially when there’s a strong public consensus betting on the underdog in a game. As you surely already know, the common theme of my articles is research–we’re discussing your money here, so it’s extremely important that you make every effort to find one advantage before making your bet. As is the case with a lot of my advice, this isn’t meant to be a universal strategy, but part of a larger overall strategy of doing your homework and eventually finding solid money-making opportunities. If you follow the advice I’ve offered in the article and combine it with several of my other strategies, you will win money–the only question is: just how much?