On your first visit to a football betting site, you might feel overwhelmed by the multitude of available betting options – point spreads, accumulators, handicaps, and such. For a first-timer, the mere number of options may feel a bit too much to handle, let alone choose the options that are safer – as in having a better chance to be won – than the others. When you bet on football, there are some things that are easier to predict – here are some of them that will be a good choice if you are at your first encounter with football betting.
Outrights and Draw No Bet
The simplest bet is always on the outright winner or loser of a match. Here, you have three simple options: the victory of the home (host) team (1), the visiting (away) team (2) or a draw (X). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this is the most popular bet both individually and as part of an accumulator.
The “Draw No Bet” is similar to the outright bet on the winner of a match – but here, you can only bet on home win (1) or away win (2). If the match ends in a draw, your money is returned.
Double chance
“Double chance” is a combined bet where you can wager on two possible outcomes at the same time. You can bet on 1X (home or draw), X2 (draw or away) or 12 (home or away). The payout of these bets can be lower, as it reduces your risk, but the bet itself is pretty safe.
Score-related bets
Predicting the outright winner of a match can be pretty easy at times – predicting the correct score at the end of the match is a trickier thing, though. This makes the “correct score” bet a riskier one – but more rewarding at the end of the day. But there are score-related bets that are much safer than predicting the exact score at the end of the game.
In the case of “Over/Under” bets you don’t have to predict the exact score but an interval. Most bookies usually offer bets on whether a match will have over (more than) 2.5 goals or under (less than) 2.5 goals, although the values can differ. In some cases, you can even bet on the possibility of under 0.5 goals (no goals at all).
In most cases, you can also bet on whether an individual player will score in a match and whether they will score over or under a certain number of goals, and other variants of this betting option.
Another popular score-related bet is on whether both teams will score in a match. This can also be a pretty safe option – except, of course when you have two high-profile teams playing against each other. Because then, there is no way to make a safe prediction.
