For starters, the home field factor is more than in other sports. Playing at home always presupposes an important advantage, and this will be reflected in the odds of the game. Sometimes, given the high standard of the away team, the odds on the associated win can still be very low, but the closer games where the theoretical favourite is playing away from home offer an excellent opportunity to bet in their favour and get a quote in excess of 1.50 euros for every euro wagered.

You will spend most of your time betting on score-related markets, rather than on either team winning, as betting on the favourite pays poorly, as well as being no guarantee of success.

If you bet on the NFL without having carefully studied all the necessary data before the game, it is quite possible that your prediction will be wrong. To avoid this, keep track of the results and statistics of previous games. And also the previous meetings between the two teams.

Be well informed before you bet

Like almost all sports, the NFL is a sport and competition where numbers rule, so you should familiarise yourself with both individual player and team statistics.

Other elements to take into account when it comes to our predictions have to do with the immediate context surrounding each game, such as the fact that the players have had little rest between games, that the team is on a bad run, that there are injuries and all those kinds of factors that you can find out about if you keep an eye on the NFL news.

Don’t forget that if you stay out of the sporting news, it will be very difficult for you to make a reliable calculation of your odds with respect to the odds offered by the bookmaker. Your NFL betting predictions today could be very different from tomorrow’s if there is a last minute injury to the team, or if there is a situation outside of the sport that could affect the expected performance of your favourite team.

Handicap bets, don’t let them slip away!

Placing our bets on the big favourite when the odds are below 1.25 is the worst idea we can have. It is not profitable at all, as there are many factors that can cause the team that is expected to win to be surprised by its rival and end up losing. Given the low payout on each euro bet, it is clear that it is not worth the investment to make a profit.

In these cases, bookmakers offer handicap betting, a type of prediction in which we add or subtract a figure to the actual result of the match so that our team has to win or lose by a certain margin. Thus, with a handicap of -11 for our favourite, our favourite would have to win by 12 points or more for our bet to be successful.

With this type of handicapping system, the odds in favour of the favourite usually increase sufficiently to be of interest to us, although we should not jump in headlong. For example, one of the team’s key players may be out of form or injured, and a setback in the middle of the game could change the course of the match and mean that a victory is not so easy or that the favourite succumbs against all odds.