Sports betting offers excitement with every pitch and agony with every turnover. But for a novice gambler, understanding some of the terminology may be a barrier to getting in the game. Really, sports betting is easy, and with just a little basic explanation most of the lexicon is conveniently understood. You’ll find basically four types of bets: sides, totals, futures, and props. We are going to explain all of these as well as a little more.

Side wagers are probably the most common sports bet. Side wagers, learn online gambling site also called straight wagers, are bets in which you pick a team to win. Side wagers have two variables – the pointspread and the moneyline. The pointspread is the range of points either added to the underdog score or subtracted from the favorite to determine whether the bet wins or not. The moneyline describes how much a winning bet pays the victor.

Sports like baseball are played almost exclusively on the moneyline. To put it differently, the pointspread is assumed to be zero. Many sportsbooks give a runline, where the pointspread is 1.5 runs, meaning the favorite has to win by two, not only a single run. Soccer and hockey also are highly reliant on the moneyline.

Football and basketball use the pointspread to great extent. Unlike baseball, the moneyline is usually fixed or only changes a little.

Total Wagers – Other than betting on a team to win or cover the spread, you can bet on the total number of points/runs/scores in a sporting event. The sportsbook sets a totals which is simply a number which they feel will generate bets over and under the total. If you bet over, you are betting that the sum of the competitors scores will be higher than the total. Nevertheless, if you bet under, you are betting fewer points are scored than the total.

Futures – Sides and totals are available for most conventional professional sports pitting Team A against Team B. But how does that work for golf tournaments or nascar races? Tennis matches can be bet with sides, but how about predicting a tournament champion? Or betting on the eventual super Bowl champion? Bets with more than 2 competitors are bet by futures. Each option has a moneyline associated with it to discover the payout – the longer the underdog the higher the return. If you can correctly pick a longshot — and win — even a small bet can pay off often times over.

Betting futures does have disadvantages. First of all, betting a future that takes a while to resolve causes the stake (the amount you wagered) to be unavailable for many months. Additionally, futures tend to either be longshots that pay out infrequently or favorites which have very little reward tempting you to place a big wager. We all like to have wishful thinking betting on your favorite team or players.

Props – For major sports events prop wagers are often available. Prop wagers are anything that will not fit in to the categories above. Consider props completely fun bets – the odds are generally awful and rarely any skill goes in to the bet. The Superbowl per year has hundreds of potential prop bets ranging from the coin flip, to whether or not the game ends in overtime. Inbetween you bet on the teams and individual players. For instance, the number of interceptions for the quarterback or the number of rushing yards for the running back.

Live Betting – Some advanced sportsbooks are now offering live in-game betting. They are really prop bets, but since the bets have an extremely short duration (e.g. will a first down be the result of the next play) they need their very own category.

That should be all you need to know for bet types as it covers all of the typical bets made in a sportsbook!