College Hoops Takes Center Stage

With the Super Bowl in the rear view mirror, the next big event on the sports stage is college basketball’s season-ending tournaments. Since 1997, college basketball’s national champion has come from several different conferences: the Pac 10 (Arizona), SEC (Kentucky and Florida), Big 10 (Michigan State), the ACC (Duke, Maryland, North Carolina), Nig 12 (Kansas) and the Big East (UConn, Syracuse). Read More…

College Hoops Betting Preview: Kansas at Texas

What was supposed to be the biggest game of the Big 12 season has lost a little luster as Texas has lost four of their last six games since rising to No. 1 in the country.

Kansas was the preseason No. 1 and the Jayhawks have taken over the top spot in the polls again. Their 22nd win of the year didn’t come easy on Saturday as they struggled to get past Nebraska 75-64.

Kansas is 2-point favorite at SBG Global and the total is set at 153 for Monday’s game (9:00 p.m. ET, ESPN).

Kansas was able to survive against Nebraska thanks to Marcus Morris who scored 20 points and grabbed 11 rebounds. In the last eight games he has scored at least 13 points and pulled down at least seven rebounds.

“I just tried to put myself in the best position to score. I feel like we came out really strong, then we started to let up. I was just trying to go hard. The other team isn’t looking for me,” Morris said. Read More…

Odds to win the 52nd Annual Daytona 500

Sweet sportsbook bonuses

With NCAA basketball season in full swing, college hoops bettors will be looking to open up online betting accounts and they’ll be searching for the best sportsbook bonuses available.

SharpBettor.com has combed the websites of some of the best online sportsbooks and has found a few excellent deals worth considering.

Currently, one of the best sportsbook promotions is being offered by SPORTSBETTING.com. All season, the book has been offering a 110 percent bonus to new customers.

Here’s how it works: The book will match your initial deposit up to $300, then add 10 percent on top of the entire deposit. So if you deposited $500, the book would give you $350 in bonuses – $300 for the match bonus and 10 percent of $500 or $50.

The maximum bonus you can get is $800, which would require a deposit of $2000.

Another excellent bonus is being offered by SBGGlobal.com. SBG is offering new and existing customers a deposit bonus of up to 30 percent on a maximum deposit of $10,000. Read More…

SharpBettor.com’s Super Bowl 44 Podcast

Handicapping experts Dave Cokin and Jim Feist discuss Super Bowl 44.

Super Bowl Sportsbook Bonuses

It’s the biggest betting weekend of the football season and online sportsbooks are rolling out the red carpet for sports bettors.

Here are some of the super bonuses the books are offering players over the next few days: Read More…

Super Bowl 44 Betting Preview: Saints vs. Colts

A high scoring game is expected on Sunday when the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts meet in Super Bowl XLIV Odds (Sunday, 6:25 p.m. ET, CBS).

The Saints had the top-ranked offense in the NFL this season led by Drew Brees while the Colts have perhaps the best quarterback in the game in Peyton Manning.

Oddsmakers seem to think there will be a lot of scoring as the total is the highest in Super Bowl history. Indianapolis is a 4.5 point favorite and the total is set at 56.5 at SBG Global.

Indianapolis will be trying to win its second Super Bowl title in the last four years while it will be the first-ever Super Bowl for the Saints.

The Saints may not have the experience edge but they do have Brees who led the NFL with a 109.8 passer rating this season. He threw for 4,388 yards and led the league with 34 touchdown passes and the Saints led the league at 31.9 points per game. Read More…

UFC 109 Betting Preview: Couture vs. Coleman

UFC 109 on Saturday, February 6 has 11 bouts on the card including a matchup of Hall of Fame fighters as Randy Couture takes on Mark Coleman at the Mandalay Bay Event Center in Las Vegas.

There are five feature fights on the pay-per-view portion of the card and six preliminary bouts, two of which will be televised on Spike.

UFC 109 has a lot of big favorites and that is somewhat unusual. Couture is -450 in UFC odds at SBG Global for his bout against Coleman. Few are giving Coleman, a former Olympic wrestler, much of a chance.

These two fighters were supposed to meet almost 12 years ago in UFC 17 but Couture was injured and pulled out. Couture is a five-time UFC champion and he has proven that he can still win big fights such as his unanimous decision victory against Brandon Vera at UFC 105.

Coleman was the first UFC heavyweight champion but he has not fought the same level of competition that Couture has faced recently. Coleman spent much of his career fighting in Japan. Read More…

Super Bowl XLIV: Pointspread hinges on Freeney ankle

By Richard Gardner, Bodog Sportsbook Manager

So with all of the two-week hype leading up to the Super Bowl, casual bettors probably believe that we at Bodog Sportsbook are inundated with action on the game for the entirety of the lead-up period.

That’s not necessarily true.

Around here people still tend to wait to make those Super Bowl bets until a day or two before the big game. In fact, our busiest period usually is the Sunday morning of the game.

Surprisingly our call center and website are fairly quiet in the hour or so leading up to kickoff, which is a departure from a normal Sunday NFL game. People tend to want to settle in at those Super Bowl parties (and watch the commercials) and get that bet down well beforehand for the big game.

By the way, we will be offering live Super Bowl betting at Bodog Sportsbook.

It has been pretty rare for a key player to be so questionable leading up to the Super Bowl in recent years, but that’s what we have in XLIV with Colts All-Pro defensive end Dwight Freeney. Read More…

Super Bowl Prop Bets: Public betting on offense

As we’ve mentioned before, betting on the Super Bowl goes far beyond whether the Colts can win by more than six points or if Indy and the Saints will hook up for more or less than 57 points.

Prop bets galore make take the Super Bowl betting experience to new heights.

Online sports book SPORTSBETTING.com has one of the largest selections of prop bets available for the big game…and they’re currently running a 125% Super Bowl sign-up bonus (you can check it out at their site).

Let’s have a look at a handful of the prop bets that are attracting attention from sports bettors.

Peyton Manning Props

The unquestioned leader of the Colts is QB Peyton Manning and as you’d expect, prop bets focused on Manning are popular.

During the regular season, Archie’s son completed 68.8 percent of his passes for 4,500 yards and in the playoffs he has a 67.5 completion percentage for 623 yards.

One prop bet offered is “What will Manning’s first pass in the big game be? A completion (-235) or an incompletion (+185)?” Read More…

Super Bowl Spread Angles

The top two seeds in both conferences have made it to the Super Bowl. That’s not the norm, as it hasn’t happened since 1993. The Colts are looking for their second Super Bowl title in four seasons while the Saints make their first trip to the big game. For those examining expert football picks, back in August the Colts were 8-to-1 to win the Super Bowl while the Saints were 18-to-1.

Last year we had a Cinderella story with Arizona coming out of nowhere to win the NFC and within seconds of a Super Bowl upset. There is no story like that this year with a pair of No. 1 seeds, though the Saints might garner some dark horse sentiment as the underdog.

We are in a golden age for the AFC, favored again to win. It’s almost as if the pendulum has swung. During the 1980s and much of the 90s, the NFC dominated, winning 15 of 16 Super Bowls, including 13 in a row. That changed in 1998 when Denver upset Green Bay, 31-24. Since then, the AFC has won 9 of the last 12, including last year.  (Follow Jim on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JimFeistSports). Read More…