If you only use one set of odds then you are doing yourself a disservice. Basically, you are just throwing money away. I’ll give you a couple of examples and if that doesn’t convince you then I guess nothing will.
Spread Sports
If you are betting point spreads then not having extra options is costing you half points or worse, full points. Let’s say you like an underdog and your only option is +2.5, but half of the books have +3. You bet $110 to win $100 at +2.5 and I bet $110 to win $100 at +3. The game ends and our team lost by 3. I push so I get my $100 back, you lose and are down $110.
How often does this happen? Depends on the sport, but in the NBA 932 games out of 23,193 have ended within a half point of the average point spread the past 19 years. That equates to about 1 in 20 of your bets. If you made 1.5 bets per day that’s two games per month you lost you should have pushed. Even if you just bet $100 per game, that’s $220 that should be in your pocket.
Money Lines
You might be saying to yourself, there are no spreads with money lines so I can’t lose a game I should have pushed there. True, but in this case you are just costing yourself dollars on nearly ever single bet.
If you bet a game at +120 and I get +122 and it wins, I get $2 more back on that bet for every $100 I wager. If we bet 1 baseball game per day for six months, just having a small 2 cent edge on each bet would mean about $180. That might not seem like much, but it’s nearly two bets more bets that I won, simply by getting a better number. Plus, you can often time save a lot more than two cents on each bet, and you are likely playing more than 1 per game.
This is why our handicappers choose the best line from six popular online sports books. They want to get the best number, and so should you.
More on our series on becoming a winning sports bettor: