It is football season! To me, this marks the beginning of fall, even though in Texas it stays hot until late October. Football season is fucking AWESOME! It is the perfect time to grill and smoke food outside, drink lots of beer, brew lots of beer, etc.. But perhaps the most important thing about football season is that it is time to make $MONEY$!.

Betting on sports, particularly on football, is not rocket science, yet it never ceases to amaze me how people seem totally confused by it, so I figured I would break it down real easy like for anyone interested. there are a few types of bets. the main two are money line bets (ML), or against the spread (ATS) bets. ML bets are straight up bets on a winner for the game.

This sounds easy, but the problem is that the odds are adjusted so that if you pick the likely winner, you don't make as much profit as you would against the spread, or if you picked the underdog. For example, if Indy was playing Oakland, Indy would clearly be the favorite by quite a bit. So the odds on Indy to win straight up might be -500. What does this number mean? All wagering is based on the amount of money you have to wager to win $100. So in the example, to win $100 you would have to wager $500. Pretty shitty payoff. If you want to wager less, and know how much you would win, you simply divide 100 by the odds. In the example, if you were to wager $20, you would divide 100 by 500 which gives you .2 and multiply it by you wager. In other words, 20x.2=4, so you profit would be $4. You of course, get your original wager back, so if you bet $20 and won, you would have a total of $24. In this same example, if you bet on Oakland instead (because you were mentally retarded), your odds would be +500. So its basically just the opposite. If you wagered $100, you would win $500 profit, for a total return, including you wager, of $600.

Next we have against the spread bets. For these, a certain amount of points is given to, or taken away, from teams. If Indy was playing Oakland, the spread may be Indy -6, which would result in Oakland being a +6. For these types of bets, you pick a team (and their points), and then apply whatever the point spread is to the total score after the game. For example, if you picked Indy -6 and the score ended up being Oakland 17, Indy 31, you would then subtract 6 from the Indy score, making the score Oakland 17, Indy 25, so you would win. In other words, Indy has to win by more than 6 for your bet to still be a winner. Adversely, if you picked Oakland +6, you then get to add 6 to their score at the end of the game, and if they win after this application, then you win.

So as you can see, betting is not hard. Perhaps it just looks intimidating. I may do another small primer on more exotic bets in the future, but for now, use your newly acquired knowledge to stick it to the man, and take all his money.