NBA betting, odds, predictions: 3 tips to increase your chances of a profitable season

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The NBA season starts Tuesday, so here are three winning tips for betting the association. Whether you are reading this before opening night or later, these approaches should be evergreen and hold true all year. Let’s get right into a deep dive into some NBA strategies.

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Be early to the market and strive for closing line value

I would say about 50% of my NBA betting volume is clicked the night before the game tips off. That number increases to about 90% of bet volume submitted before noon on game day. The reason is because the NBA markets can move drastically and being in front of line movement and having the correct direction is the key to long-term and consistent winning.

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Having a better number on a side/total/money line or player prop than is available anywhere in the market when the game tips off is known as generating closing line value. CLV is the most important secondary metric for sharp bettors. I do not care if I am betting an underdog, a favorite, any number against the spread, any vig price on a favorite or a long shot — everything in betting is relative to the price at tipoff. Understanding your CLV metrics like how often you close ahead and by how much you close ahead, is the best way to understand your profit/loss results. A bettor consistently getting CLV but losing should stick with the process because long term and on a large sample size he or she will win. On the other hand, a winning bettor on mostly negative-CLV tickets is probably just getting lucky. Understanding your CLV is how you understand your skill level.

An example of this is betting the Golden State Warriors -1.5 (-115 currently at BetMGM) at the L.A. Lakers for opening night. I suspect this line closes at Warriors -2 (-115) or -2.5 (-105), and therefore holding a -1.5 Warriors ticket would be both directionally correct and ahead of the market. That is a winning approach long term.

In the last year or two, we have seen NBA lines get really sharp around noon ET on game day. At that point, the majority of NBA line movement in the market is correlated to injury news and less indicative of a clear sharp side. If you are early to the market, you can consistently be a point or more ahead on spreads and two or more points ahead on totals. Doing that will net you a 55% win rate long term and north of a 3% ROI.

Handicap with the right resources

One of the most frequent questions I am asked: “How are you so good at identifying which way the market is going to move?” The primary answer is I do my handicapping with the right resources, and I am happy to share a list of what’s included in that.

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The first and foremost absolute need is an odds screen. An odds screen is a real-time betting tool that lists a lot of sportsbooks along with the current lines available for the games in one dashboard. The availability of odds screens in the market runs the gamut; there are free odds screens, low-cost odds screens and very high-priced ones. Regardless of your bet sizing, find the right odds screen that works for you and get good at using it. I do not recommend spending more than 1-2 units per month on the cost, but having the tool will help net the results.

The second thing I use is a model. I have spent years crafting (and forever tinkering) with a high-level NBA model. My model will list the home team and away team and spit out a projected spread and total for the game. It takes into account a lot of stats as data points, as well as manual adjustments like travel and rest advantages and disadvantages. I understand not everyone has access to a model, but if you want to take your NBA betting very seriously try to create one. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials to follow, and then from there your goal is to tinker with the model with the objective of having your model reflect as close as possible the closing spread and total for the games. Focus less on short-term winning (small sample and transitory) and more on accuracy regarding the betting market.

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The third must have for me is updated injury reports. The NBA has gotten wonky with injury reporting and rest spots over the last five years, so much so that accurate injury information might be one of the biggest edges in NBA betting. I highly recommend following injury aggregator accounts on your preferred social media platforms, as well as beat writers for every team. Here is a list of beat writers for every NBA team. It is a completely free resource to use to your advantage. If you have an understanding of the projected lineups and injury reports (which come out mainly between 2 p.m. ET and game time), you can find yourself in dominant positions against the market.

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I would also like to highlight a few resources I do not use. This is about working smarter not harder. I rarely look at a previous box score for the team I am betting. A lot of betting information in the market will focus on trends and recent results, without mentioning all recent results are certainly factored into the current line. Relying too much on recent results could have you chasing past performance and not correctly predicting future performance. In fact, I usually go the opposite way with the concept that recent results don’t change much from a larger season sample size.

Choose the right bet type, and minimize parlays and ladders

Choosing the wrong bet type can often outweigh choosing the right individual bets to make. This often comes in the form of parlays and “ladder” or “escalator” bets.

Let me explain basic parlay math to highlight how bad parlays are. A standard two-leg parlay, without any correlation tax in a single-game parlay, pays out at odds of +264. However, there are four possible outcomes. A three-leg parlay under the same premise pays out at +600 with eight possible outcomes. A four-leg parlay pays out +1200 with 16 possible outcomes. With every parlay leg added, the possible outcomes are raised exponentially, and the expected negative ROI goes up and up as well. Below is a chart I made to highlight the problem with parlay betting. Even +EV strategies like obtaining closing line value cannot compete with the -EV bet into parlays. There are a few situations worth doing a parlay, but I personally use those strategies in less than 2% of my bets.

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Other new and intriguing avenues are ladders and escalator bets. A common trap is to think Lebron James with a points prop at over 23.5 (-110) is going to have an awesome game, so a bettor will also stack on 25-plus and 30-plus points at plus odds. These are not ladder bets; this is betting into a derivative market. When you really study the math of derivative markets, the percentage of the money the book is expected to make steadily rises from the standard lines, and you are not getting fair odds in plus value relative to the points you are selling. This also works for the inverse, playing Lebron at 15-plus points is not safe compared to the vastly increased vig price. It is still a rip-off.

Bettors often tell me they have been profitable betting ladders or playing parlays, so they keep doing it. And while that’s a great outcome, that is not the right question to be asking. The right question is: Would you have been even more profitable playing all those bets as straight single wagers? Would you have been even more profitable putting all the exposure bet into derivative markets simply on the standard prop line? If bettors really take the time to study their habits and choose the right path, the answers become obvious.

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Good luck this season! If you are interested in getting more game-to-game information, I host a live stream on X (@FiddlesPicks) every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, reviewing every NBA spread and total on the board. I will also be writing at least one article per week here at Yahoo Sports, giving betting advice and picks specific to games.

This news was originally published on this post .

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