Betting on NBA basketball is a favorite pastime among handicappers. With 30 franchises scheduled for 82 regular-season games each, the league presents a wealth of wagering opportunity and value to bettors willing to search for it. This is especially true now that the NBA is becoming increasingly data-driven, though that also makes finding an edge more challenging.
With that said, finding success and profits through wagering on basketball requires a combination of discipline, organization, and research. There’s much more to making money at the sportsbook than looking at the slate of upcoming matchups and trying to pick the winners.
Your best bet is to have specific scenarios you’re waiting to wager on, always keeping value in mind at the same time.
This article will share a handful of proven NBA betting systems to help you identify and take advantage of the most favorable opportunities. There are a plethora of factors and variables that impact the outcome of any given game.
Rather than cramming numbers and fretting over individual matchups, these systems give you exact situations to target for your wagers. If there aren’t any games on the schedule that meet the conditions shared on this page, you’re probably better off waiting until one does.
To skip ahead to a specific betting system, follow the jump links below. Otherwise, I’m going to give a brief overview of some handicapping concepts that are fundamental to these strategies. Before you can jump in and start collecting your earnings, you have to build a foundation that starts with understanding betting value and the importance of sound bankroll management.
To obtain any real level of success through NBA handicapping, or sports betting in general, you’ll need to have a plan. No, this doesn’t need to be a long, drawn-out chore, but you do need a basic outline for your finances. Consider the amount you can afford to wager, the frequency at which you want to bet, and the length of time before you’re allowed to deposit more cash into your account.
Bettors who just blindly lay down bets without any kind of organization always end up losing money long-term. Sure, they still enjoy the occasional wins and get to appreciate the added entertainment that wagering brings to a sporting event, but the house still ends up benefiting the most.
Fortunately, by making some relatively minor improvements to your approach, in combination with some sound NBA betting systems, you can drastically increase your chances of growing your bankroll throughout the basketball season.
Most of you readers will be betting online, which means you’ll need to deposit money into an account. Once the transaction is complete, that cash can then be used to fund wagers in your chosen website’s sportsbook. Before moving any money, you need to take an honest look at your finances and learn how to manage your bankroll.
Instead of randomly making more deposits whenever you have a few extra bucks, you need to have an organized plan from the start. Analyze your financial situation and determine the amount you can afford to lose on this hobby without it causing you any harm or disturbing your day-to-day life in any way. You should be comfortable losing all of it, even though this obviously isn’t the goal.
Whatever that figure turns out to be, that’s your bankroll. You also need to set a hard date for how long your cash should last. Once you’ve decided on that timeline, don’t deposit any more money until you’ve reached that day. Hopefully, by using the strategies and systems on this page, you won’t run out of your bankroll anyway. Your winnings will keep your account flush with cash.
Once you have your initial bankroll established, it’s time to organize how you’re going to use it. It doesn’t do you much good to study your finances and deposit money into an online sportsbook account only to blow the entire thing on a few bad bets.
A staking plan is how you divide your bankroll into individual wagers and ensure your cash lasts however long you need. It also keeps you on a more consistent and measured schedule. This organizes both the size and frequency of your bets.
One of the reasons you want to standardize your staking this way is to maximize value and protect you from fluky losses. Imagine if you were winning a high percentage of your picks, but happened to stake significantly more on the few you lost. You can easily turn some excellent handicapping into net losses, merely by managing your staking plan.
Now, staking plans can become quite complex. Bettors determine the amount to risk based on a variety of metrics, including confidence, implied probability, and variance. In this piece, however, we’ll just be sticking to the basics. You can create more sophisticated strategies as you grow as a handicapper.
There are two simple ways to organize your bankroll into a series of individual bets:
There isn’t a betting system in the world that can guarantee you a winning wager 100% of the time. Between the natural variance in sports outcomes and the house advantage that oddsmakers build into the lines, growing your bankroll is much more complicated than merely identifying the victorious team more often than not.
The only way to enjoy sustained success is by keeping the concept of betting value in mind when making your picks. A bet possesses value anytime the real-life probability of an event happening is higher than the implied probability, which is calculated by converting the odds into a percentage form.
To best visualize how betting value works, picture wagering on a coin toss. As we know, there are only two possible outcomes when flipping a coin: heads or tails. This means there’s a 50% chance of either side landing on any given toss.
Without factoring in house advantage, you’d expect a bet with a 50% chance of going either way to payout even money, or -100 moneyline odds. But what if the oddsmakers set the line on “heads” at -120 and “tails” at +115?
The implied probability of -120 odds is 54.55%. For a +115 line, the implied probability is 46.51%.
Value is available when the actual likelihood of an outcome occurring is higher than the implied probability. That’s because a wager with an IP less than 50% will payout more than even money. Another way to think of implied probability is that the percentage is the rate at which your picks must win to break even.
So, if you’re consistently wagering $100 on coin tosses that are paying out $115 for “tails,” that additional $15 will start adding up, expanding your bankroll over time. No matter how strongly you feel that the next toss will land on “heads,” you can’t ever make that wager. It’s not worth it.
Sports handicapping works the exact same way, just slightly more complicated. To profit, you must be good at setting your own lines for NBA games, as if you were the oddsmaker. Then, compare your probabilities with the implied probabilities and decide if there’s value in placing a bet.
With many of the following systems, we have data over the past several seasons that you can use to help forecast certain outcomes. If a particular scenario results in the home team covering 65% of the time against the spread, you’ll know to compare that figure to the implied probability to determine whether or not you should wager.
I’ve explained what implied probability is in the previous subsection, but how do you convert betting odds into a percentage form? Here, you’ll find the equations to solve for implied probability, regardless of the style of betting odds you’ve encountered. You’ll also find that many betting-related websites host IP calculators of their own.
Negative (Favorite) Moneyline Odds to Implied Probability
Positive (Underdog) Moneyline Odds to Implied Probability
Decimal Odds to Implied Probability
Fractional Odds to Implied Probability
Now that we’ve gotten all of the fundamentals out of the way, it’s time to start applying some tried and true NBA betting systems into your handicapping! This first strategy is the building block upon which winning bettors are made—you want to be a contrarian. To maximize value, you want to use the public’s tendencies to your advantage.
The more lopsided the betting action that comes in on one side of a bet or the other, the more significantly the line moves. Sportsbooks prefer to attract an even amount of money on each side of a wager, so the vig (or house advantage) will guarantee the book profits. That’s why they gradually shift the odds in response to how the public is betting.
Some of the best opportunities to wager on the NBA are when the vast majority of the action is coming in on only one side. If all you do is watch for significant line movement and fade the public by taking the other side, you’ll likely make some decent winnings.
The public is often extremely reactionary, plus, they tend to overhype good teams and favorites. Since 2005, teams receiving between 8% to 30% of the action, moving the point spread between 2 and 13.5 points, have won against the spread roughly 58% of the time, earning a return of +53.81 units.
Sometimes, you’ll find that the line isn’t moving in the direction you’d expect based on where the public money is going. That usually means the professionals (AKA “sharp money”) are taking the other side. The sportsbooks would rather protect themselves against these big bettors than allow the public to provide them with even more value.
Another excellent NBA betting system, created using Bet Labs, involves identifying reverse line movement and betting on the under. However, there are a few more variables to consider.
This is the situation you’re looking for:
When these conditions are present, bettors taking the under have won nearly 59% of their wagers, profiting an impressive +81.25 units. According to BetLabs, this system has resulted in a 14.8% return on investment since the 2005 NBA season.
As I mentioned previously, casual bettors tend to overreact to surface-level information and statistics. For example, you may hear a sports pundit point out that a certain franchise frequently covers the over on totals bets when playing at home. Naturally, the public reacts by taking the over the next time that team is playing in their own stadium.
The thing is, oddsmakers know to anticipate this reaction. Also, the influx of betting action pushes the total even higher. That’s why the smart move is to be a contrarian once again and fade the public. If you throw in a few additional variables to consider, you have yourself a potent NBA betting system.
Here’s what you’re looking for:
Since 2005, this scenario has presented itself on 903 occasions. Bets on the under have won 514 times, with only 12 pushes. That is a winning rate of 57.7%. This NBA betting system provides a return on investment of 12.5%.
While the league has undoubtedly gotten better about how they schedule the season in recent years, teams are still forced to endure stretches of playing on very little rest during the NBA year. League officials have done away with the brutal “four games in five nights” arrangements of the past, but you’ll still find back-to-back contests and long road trips littered throughout each franchise’s schedule.
It’s an undeniable fact that additional rest days are a significant advantage during the regular season. A team competing after an extended four-day break has won their next matchup 52.2% of the time since 2005. Squads with two days or fewer between games only win 49.4% of their next contests.
The ideal situation is when an organization coming off an extended break faces off with an opponent that played within the past two days. This NBA betting system is especially valuable later in the regular season, more specifically, in January or later.
Since 2005, whenever a well-rested squad has competed against a team on a regular one to two-day rest schedule between the months of January and April, the side with fresher legs has covered the spread 55.5% of the time.
However, you don’t want to include teams playing a back-to-back against a rested opponent. There needs to be at least one or two days between contests. That’s because the public tends to overreact to organizations playing consecutive games. Including back-to-backs, this drops the system’s winning percentage by 2%.
If you want to make this NBA betting system even more useful, search out situations in which the visiting team is the one returning from at least four days of recovery. Thanks to the public’s overvaluing of home-court advantage, a well-rested road squad facing a home team that played in the last one to two days will beat the spread at a rate of 61.1%!
One of the least complicated basketball betting systems to take advantage of involves targeting large home underdogs. Find a team playing at home that’s getting 10 points or more. Then, you want to analyze the public action.
If the 10-point (or more) home dog is also receiving 30% or fewer of the public action, you’ve hit the jackpot. Teams meeting these conditions win against the spread 56.5% of the time, offering a 10.4% return on investment.
Be on the lookout for those double-digit home dogs!
Now, if it’s the first week of the season, home underdogs are even more valuable. Teams opening their season as an underdog on their home court cover the spread 61.7% of the time!
You’ve probably noticed by now that the key to creating a winning NBA betting system is anticipating how the public will respond to different variables, then using the casuals’ action to create value for yourself.
Historically, the public will overreact to a particularly poor offensive performance in the previous game. After a lousy outing, you’ll frequently see tons of bettors fading that team in their next matchup. This gives smart handicappers yet another opportunity to profit from playing the contrarian.
To maximize the effectiveness of this system, you want to find a home team, with a winning record—.500 or above—that made 40% or fewer of their field goal attempts in their previous contest. Between the public action moving the totals lines and NBA players psychologically bouncing back after hard losses, organizations in this position tend to cover at a rate of 62%.
Looking at the last 250 games that met this description, handicappers who utilized this system would have earned a 20.6% return on investment!
No matter what sport you happen to be betting on, there’s always additional value to be found at the start of the season. It’s when the public and oddsmakers alike are still somewhat uncertain about how teams will perform. It’s the perfect time of year to exploit mispriced lines and residual opinions from the previous year, which may no longer be relevant.
One scenario worth seeking out is when a team competing in their season opener is facing an opponent that’s already played a game. The franchises participating in their first contests of the year have won 58.7% of their bets against the spread under these conditions. If they’re also the underdog in their debut matchup, these squads are covering the spread 66.7% of the time since 2005.
Most casual bettors assume that teams who were bad the prior year will continue to be poor for the new season. While that may be the case, that doesn’t mean they’ll be total pushovers in the season opener. Young squads who may wilt down the stretch of the regular season enter the year with high morale and winning expectations.
Between the players’ added motivation and fresh legs, and the public’s negative expectations for these same organizations, opening week is the prime time to wager on bad teams. Franchises that won fewer than 25 games the year before have historically covered the spread 62.1% of the time in their season opener.
The longer an NBA season drags on, the more injuries and fatigue begin to pile up and impact player performances. We saw in an earlier betting system that well-rested teams gain a larger advantage in January and beyond for this very reason. While the season is still young, however, back-to-backs present an opportunity to exploit public perceptions once again.
After a long offseason of rest and recovery, NBA athletes are more resilient to challenging schedules. It’s not until they’ve been on the road grinding for a few months that the time between contests starts to really matter, but the square bettors don’t know that!
Early in the year is an excellent time to wager on road teams playing on the second night of a back-to-back. With the public overrating both the need for rest and the impact of home-court advantage, this scenario presents lots of betting value.
You want a road squad playing between their second and 12th game of the year. They should have competed the day before, also on the road. When these conditions are all met, the away team has covered the point spread 58% of the time, generating a return on investment of 13.5%.
This guide to NBA betting systems will supply you with everything you need to have a successful basketball season at the sportsbooks. Armed with these proven strategies, all you have to do is identify the appropriate scenarios and bet accordingly. And don’t forget to calculate the implied probability.
In the previous sections, I shared the winning percentages for each of the betting systems shared on this page. All you have to do is compare those figures with the implied probabilities of the various lines to determine whether or not your wager has value. If teams in a particular situation cover the spread 62% of the time, but the implied probability is 52%, that’s a solid bet!
Of course, just because your wagers have value, doesn’t mean they’ll always win. Sometimes you can make the right decision but still receive the wrong result. That’s what makes sports so exciting. Sometimes, the thing that only had a 1% chance of occurring actually happens!
That’s why you have to organize your bankroll and create a staking plan right from the beginning. Through disciplined staking, you can ensure that the math is on your side. By only making bets that have positive value, you’ll be able to withstand the occasional streak of bad luck because your wins will be building up your bankroll as they should.
The NBA betting systems found on this page were primarily created using Bet Labs software, which allows you to apply a wide variety of filters, to decades of historical basketball data, to find winning patterns. In order to truly stay ahead of the pack, smart handicappers are always looking for the latest edge, tweaking, and adjusting their systems along the way.
While these methods have been effective for handicappers thus far, they won’t always retain their value. Be sure to continually search out new statistics and tools to keep your predictions as accurate and profitable as possible.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
