Hockey Sports Betting

Hockey: The Toughest Sport to Beat

It’s hard for a sports bettor to beat a sport when he can’t find a bookie to take his action. Even in Las Vegas, where over 20 bookmakers exist, a hockey bookie is difficult to find. That’s not a comfortable situation for a gambler, because one of his ways of cutting into the bookmaker’s edge is shopping around for the best lines. With two bookies, there’s very little shopping he can do; with one, there’s none at all.

Finding A Bookmaker

The absence of bookmakers who deal with sports bet in hockey is not limited to Las Vegas. Throughout the South and West, a gambler is hard-pressed to find anyone who books hockey; even then he’d only find someone in cities like Los Angeles and Denver that have local hockey teams. In places like Phoenix or Miami, he can pretty much forget hockey except occasionally during the Stanley Cup play-offs. Only in the Midwest, the Northeast and, of course, Canada, where most of the National Hockey League’s franchises are clustered, are there a sizeable number of bookmakers who deal hockey. While some bookmakers don’t deal baseball or college basketball because they fear their players will beat them, that’s not the case in hockey. Across most of the country, the betting public simply isn’t interested in the sport but in horse racing. Even bookmakers who do deal hockey don’t get nearly the action they get in other sports, which as a result creates a second problem for the guy who does want to bet hockey—namely, the juice he has to pay.

The Hockey Betting Line

The basic goal of a bookmaker is to have a lot of action. Thus, though he deals a 20-cent line to his average baseball bettors, he might offer big players a 10-cent line to get their business. He knows he’s cutting his vigorish in half, but he feels he’ll turn a bigger profit in the long run because of the greater volume. His thinking is not so different from the laundry detergent company that offers a reduced price per ounce for the “giant economy size” of its product. However, because bookmakers on the whole get so little hockey action, they feel they have to increase the juice. Therefore, they require gamblers who bet hockey to give up a greater percentage than they do in any other betting lines . The most common way hockey is booked is with a split line. In a game between the Montreal Canadiens and the New York Islanders at Nassau Coliseum, for example, the line might be Islanders 1-1½. That translates into: Islanders -1½,Canadiens +1.

Football and Basketball Sports Bet

The bettor wagers even money, not II to 10 as in football and basketball. However, if he bets the favored Islanders, he gives up 1½ goals, needing therefore to win by two; while if he bets the Canadiens, he gets only one goal. Either way he’s getting a half-goal the worst of it. That half-goal is enormous. In professional football, where 35 to 40 points are scored during a game on average, and in pro basketball where more than 200 points are scored, serious gamblers might search endlessly to get a half-point the best of it on the team they like. This is because they know that california lottery little half-point can mean the difference between winning and tying, or tying and losing. But in hockey, where only seven or eight goals are scored per game on average, the bettor has to give up a big half-goal going in. If the bettor doesn’t have to lay11to10, where is the bookie’s profit? Imagine that as a 1½ goal favorites over Montreal, the Islanders win by exactly one goal. What that means is all the Islanders bettors, who laid 1½ goals, lose; while all the Montreal bettors, who got only one goal, tie. So the bookie stands off the Montreal money, while he rakes in all the Islanders money.

The record shows that approximately 20% of the time, hockey games end with one side losing and the other side tying. Most of the time the bookmaker more or less breaks even, paying the winners with the losers’ money. Twenty percent of the time, however, he wins half of the money outright bet on a game, which computes to a 10% edge overall. That is more than twice his edge in football and basketball. In fact, the split line in hockey is just about equal to the 40-cent line in baseball, which every baseball bettor agrees is virtually impossible to overcome as compare to sports handicapping. In the Northeast and Canada, it is possible to find some bookmakers who deal a flat line along with a money price similar to baseball. Thus, in that Islanders-Montreal game,the Islanders might be a l-goal favorite, but if you bet on them, you have to lay $1.50 to win $1. If you bet on the Canadiens, you get one goal and bet $1 to win $1.30. When you’re able to find a bookmaker dealing such a line, you’re better off with him than with a bookie who deals the more common split line. If you’re lucky enough to find the rare bookmaker who deals a fiat line with the bettor laying II to 10 either way, that’s the best deal of all, reducing the bookmaker’s edge to the same 4.76% as he has in football and basketball. On the other hand, any bookmaker who deals a split line and also requires you to lay II to 10 is simply stealing your money; don’t do business with him.Since the split line at even money is the most generally used throughout the United States and Canada, this is the line with which we will concern ourselves throughout the remainder of this article.