Betting the NCAA College Basketball Tournament Articles | Gambling

By: Richard Bleuze

Betting the NCAA College Basketball Tournament

In terms of wagering popularity, the NCAA Tournament is big business for bookmakers and bettors alike.  NCAA Tournament is only second to the Super Bowl.  Many gamblers who typically do not give college basketball a second thought get often involved through office pools or placing wagers through sports books and their bookies. 

Often when the public gets involved in sports betting, you generally take an anti-public stance and bet against the public.  That generally means betting the underdog and the games to go under the total.  However, that has not been the situtation during March Madness in recent years.

Granted the past few years of the NCAA Tournament, better known as March Madness, we see that favorites and overs have actually been profitable straight across the board.  However, that has not always been the case with the NCAA Tournament. A few interesting trends that have taken place are:

As I mentioned above, betting favorites has been profitable during the past few years of the NCAA Tournament.  Especially, betting large favorites!

However, there are several instances where betting the underdogs has proven to be profitable for the sports bettor, especially the recreational sports bettors.   However, favorites of 2.5 points or less do not have that high of a winning percentage as compared to higher point favorites. 

Thus, underdogs of less than 5.5 points have been about 59 percent against the spread during the past few years.  That is not really a "bad" winning percentage at all!

Over the past few years, roughly 54 percent of the games have gone over the posted total.  That is not that "bad" either of a winning percentage.  However, if we exclude games where the total is under 125, then the winning percentage is even highter than 54%. 

Thus, you should be looking for games that are essentially called by the oddsmaker to be extremely low scoring and place a bet on those in addition to the other games which tend to go over the posted total.  Those games in the NCAA Tournament have made those bets to be one of the best over bets during the past few years of the NCAA Tournament.

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