NASCAR: Big moneymaker? Bet on it
Seems like every day the pool of serious sports gamblers looking to dip their feet into NASCAR betting grows exponentially. That being said, here’s a little guide to getting started in race car gambling, one that can pay off huge if you know what you’re doing.
One of the most popular and widely used forms of race car betting is simply to play the driver such as Kevin Harvick to win. This is also the simplest to learn, as it borrows much of its rules and strategy from straight line bets similar to other sports. Of course, it’s a much higher payoff if your favorite driver wins as opposed to your favorite team, since the odds are stacked so high against any one driver in any given race.
Let’s say you want to put $500 on Dale Earnhardt Jr. to win the next race. So you’d put up $500 to win, say, $4,000. You need to calculate the risk and the “break even” percentage to determine if the payoff is worth the risk. The “break even” percentage would be how many times the driver would have to win in order for you, the gambler, to break even. In this case, the nascar betting odds would be 1:9 or 11 percent.
This is an extremely risky method of gambling, though. Even the top names, the points leaders, are only going to give you a few to a handful of wins a season. So while the return might be like hitting a roulette number, you have to assess whether you want to take the risk.
A safer (and in my opinion more fun) bet is to gamble on driver vs. driver. This is exactly like playing the baseball money line. You’d see something like Driver A vs. Driver B. Driver A at -130, Driver B at +120 NASCAR Odds. This means you’d have to put 130 on Driver A to win 100, but if you put 100 on Driver B, you’d win 120. All the driver has to do under this wager is beat the other driver he’s up against in the bet, not win the race.
While you don’t have an entire team of players to study for NASCAR betting, you do need to stay up on race statistics, driving conditions and who’s hot and who’s not. Study up on the pit team while you’re at it. There are a few more bets that can be placed regularly that I’ll go into in a future article.