Now that the 2022 NFL campaign is finally underway, chances are you’re betting on it. There is also a good chance that this is your first time betting on sports.
More new players seem to lace up during the NFL season than any other season. At least that’s true in the United States, where NFL betting plays a bigger role than any other sport.
By far.
Of course, as a beginner, you start with the basics.
You’ve probably already done a lot of research on whether it’s actually legal to bet on sports in your state (it is), what your region’s sports betting laws say about online gambling (nothing), and so on.
You probably placed a few bets straight and a few more against the spread. You might even have some money on the Rams’ retake odds (zero) or Tampa Bay’s chances of sending Tom Terrific with an eighth Super Bowl title to show his impending divorce (50-50).
But after all the straights and spreads and totals and NFL props etc. you might notice something if you dig deeper:
Many of the concepts associated with sports betting are mirrored in the concepts underlying stock market trading.
And that makes sense: stock trading is gambling! All stock investing is essentially betting futures, and more specialized maneuvers also have their direct (similar) analogs to sports betting.
For example, puts and calls are similar to guaranteed bets and bets on early payouts, while shorting a stock is like taking a massive underdog early in the season to secure a huge payout at the end. (Or maybe it’s the other way around. You get the point.)
These are of course overly simplistic views, but the point is that there is a certain undeniable similarity between sports betting and stock market games.
So much so that stock trading is specifically – by name – exempt from all US federal and state betting laws.
And the similarities aren’t just in sports betting.
Stock trading is an exercise in financial speculation, which in turn makes it gambling by definition. There are as many conceptual similarities between stock trading and sports betting as there are between stock trading and casino gambling (or, if you are less “informed”, between playing the stock market and playing the lottery).
And of course there are also similarities – in nomenclature and practice – between all of these things and crypto trading.
Speculation is speculation is speculation.
A rose by another name.
Etc.
But while we know this to be true, it’s always amusing when sports betting terms crop up in the crypto space – especially as both markets become more mainstream (and of course supporting each other in the process) to bet on sports with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, remember).
A good example of this phenomenon is Tuesday’s story from Watcher.Guru, whatever that is. The story, so titled using familiar betting terminology, immediately caught our attention:
“This whale is betting against Do Kwon’s LUNA again”
Whales are, of course, high rollers who come in and eat (or otherwise crowd out) any small fish.
The most famous sports betting whale of all time – a guy named Billy Walters – used his financial clout to move entire betting lines. A million dollars here to move the line one way and two million dollars for the resulting spread going the other way. That’s how you do it.
If you are a whale
what you are not
But as a sports bettor, it’s always important to keep an eye on the whales, because you can actually bond with these players like a remora fish (or barnacle if you’re particularly annoying) and own some of their rewards .
When Walters moved a line, he wasn’t the only one to benefit from the new spread. So this is a lesson for you.
The other lesson – at least from the crypto blog linked above – is that if you’re still high on LUNA in any way, you haven’t been paying attention.
There was a time when we thought Terra LUNA would be the next crypto sports betting banking option at BetOnline, and we’re still hitting the road.
Luckily we weren’t really invested in the stuff.
But even though Terra Labs sees its stablecoin permanently de-pegged from the US dollar — and even though LUNA 1.0 falls from over $90 per coin to less than a cent per coin in three short days — some people are still getting do-kwon from this -Character cheated and his LUNA 2.0 nonsense.
And others, like this whale, can move the market enough to make money.
That’s one more lesson for you.
As a new sports bettor, don’t let the big fish (or mammals, whatever) make money off your losing bets.
Sure, there are times when that can’t really be helped. But if some longshots seem too good to be true, it probably is. Betting this way will only give someone else a bigger payout.
Don’t wait too long to gamble on a favorite either. Given enough time, “smart money” tends towards zero. This is why house bets are so much better than pari-mutuel bets. The pool can get very crowded.
Of course, it’s not called gambling for nothing.
And it’s a much bigger market than you probably thought.