What is ‘mediocre’ and why bother with it? Middling is where you can seriously increase your betting profits by benefiting from both sides of the action.
You can do this by carefully monitoring the movement of the line and finding a situation where betting on both sides becomes advantageous. The downside would be a small loss due to vig/juice (sports betting commission).
You can use this betting strategy on any sport where you have a point spread, for example NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and college sports. As an example, let’s take a basketball game between the Lakers and the Cavaliers. We’ll keep things simple and, for argument’s sake, say that the spread from the first posted line reads: Lakers -3, Cavaliers +3.
The smart bettor evaluates this spread and determines that the Lakers have good value, so bets the Lakers at -3 on the point spread.
A day or two later, the sportsbook decides that it’s taking too much action on the ever-popular Lakers, so in an attempt to balance things out, it decides to move the spread to Lakers -4.5 and default to Cavaliers. to +4.5. . The linemaker fundamentally wants to draw more action on the Cavaliers and reduce the amount of action he’s getting on the Lakers.
The odds remain at this level and the smart bettor decides to go back in and bet the Cavs at +4.5. What do you hope to achieve with this? He is looking in the middle of the spread.
If the Lakers win by 4 points, your Laker bet wins at -3 and your Cavalier bet wins at +4.5. Let’s say you bet $110 on both bets with standard odds of -110, you win $200. If you lose, you lose on one bet by -$110 and win on the other by +$100, so you only lose $10.
Now, of course, the punter will not hit your center every game or even every fifth game, but all you need to do to break even is hit your center once in twenty-one games. So if his total loss after twenty games is $200 (20x $10) and he hits the middle in game twenty-one, he will win $200.
In all likelihood, the smart player will hit his center much more frequently than once every twenty-one games. You get great value and drastically reduce its downside – the reason for betting on media in the first place. If the bettor doesn’t care about his downside, he can simply choose to keep his original bet, in this case the Lakers at -3, knowing that he has a big bet with the spread moving to -4.5.
It gets better for the ‘intermediates’ in terms of their downside because they can still make a profit even if they fall short of their means. Quite often they will ‘push’ (tie/break) on one bet and win on the other. So, if the Lakers win by 3 points, the bettor would push that bet to -3 and get their bet back with no loss, but win on the Cavaliers bet at +4.5 for a profit of $100.
Remember that the better the line movement, the more chances you have to hit a ‘middle’.
