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 on the first line posted reads: Lakers -3, Cavaliers +3.
The smart bettor evaluates this spread and determines that the Lakers have good value, so they bet the Lakers at -3 on the point spread.
A day or two later, the sportsbook decides they are taking too much action on the ever-popular Lakers, so in an attempt to even things out, they decide to move the spread to Lakers -4.5 and default to the 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.
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, you win your Laker bet at -3 and you win your Cavalier bet at +4.5. Let’s say you bet $110 on both bets with a standard odds of -110, you win $200. If he loses, he loses on one bet by -$110 and wins on the other by +$100, so he only loses $10.
Now, of course, the bettor won’t hit his cross every game or even every fifth game, but all he needs to do to break even is hit his cross 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 often than once in twenty-one games. You get great value and drastically reduce your downside – the reason to bet on the media in the first place. If the bettor doesn’t care about the negative side of him, 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 don’t hit their means. Very 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 returned with no loss, but win with the Cavaliers bet at +4.5 for a $100 profit.
Remember that the better the line movement, the better chance there is of hitting a ‘medium’.