Totals Betting For Beginners
Punters often enjoy placing different bets on their favourite sports.
Experienced players know that the most widely used 🧾 and most popular types of bets are moneyline (when you bet on a specific team to win) and point spread 🧾 (where you place wagers on a team winning by a specific number of points or goals). However, another commonly used 🧾 type of wager is Totals.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know precisely how totals betting works and how to 🧾 place these bets on your own.
Let’s take a look.
What is the total or over/under in betting?
A total bet is simple; 🧾 it’s a bet on the overall result on any match or event. This can be used in football, tennis, basketball, 🧾 and many other sports. With totals bets, it doesn’t matter who wins, it only matters what the overall score is, 🧾 or more specifically, the total score in the game.
In most cases, a bookie will allow you to place either a 🧾 Total Under bet (TU) or a Total Over (TO) bet. Because of this, a totals wager is often called an 🧾 over/under bet as well. The names are interchangeable, and they signify the same thing. For that reason, we’ll use both 🧾 names throughout the article.
Whichever name you wish to use, the bet is the same — you need to wager on 🧾 a total score being over or under a specific number.
Let’s look at this example from the 888sport betting site:
In this 🧾 English Premier League football match between Chelsea and Everton, you must predict whether the total number of goals will be 🧾 higher or lower than 1.5.
If two or more goals are scored, the “over” bet wins, regardless of who wins the 🧾 match or whether it ends in a draw.
If you bet on “under”, you will need only one or none goals 🧾 to be scored in order to win the bet.
For the “over” bet, the bookmaker sets the odds to be 1.20. 🧾 For example, if Chelsea wins 3-1, that would mean that there are four goals scored in total. Therefore, the “over” 🧾 bet would be the winning one.
If you place a £100 wager on this outcome, it would result in a win 🧾 of £120 (1.20 multiplier x £100 wager) and bring you a profit of £20.
Another case would be the “under” bet, 🧾 where the bookmaker sets the odds of 4.33. For example, if Chelsea wins 1-0, that would mean that there is 🧾 one goal scored in total. Or, if there is a draw of 0-0, that would still make the “under” bet 🧾 to be the winning one, since the total goals scored are less than 1.5.
If you place a £100 wager on 🧾 this outcome, it would result in a win of £433 (4.33 multiplier x £100 wager) and earn you a profit 🧾 of £333.
Totals are the easiest to understand in football, as the scoring system is simple. In other sports, it can 🧾 be a bit more complicated. However, as long as you know the sport, you’ll understand how Totals work and increase 🧾 your odds of winning.
For example, in tennis, there can be more than a single over/under bet. However, the most popular 🧾 is a total bet on games in a match. Here is an example from the 10bet betting site:
So, if you 🧾 were to place a 21.5 “under” bet on a match, it means that the total number of games will have 🧾 to be 21 or below. If the match ends with a score of 2:1 in sets (6:1, 2:6, 6:0), you 🧾 will have won the bet. That’s because the total score is 6+1+2+6+6+0=21.
In this case, if you place a £100 wager 🧾 on this “under” bet, it would result in a win of £183 (1.83 multiplier x £100 wager) and earn you 🧾 a profit of £83.
Different bookies (such as Betition, Betfred, or Betfair) might represent the bet differently, or they might offer 🧾 several types of over/under bets. However, the main point is always the same — you’re betting on the total score 🧾 or something else being either over or under a specific number.
Other forms of totals bets
Most people prefer standard Totals bets 🧾 where you can bet on the total score in the match. However, there are many other forms of Totals bets 🧾 as well. For instance, if you love golf, you can bet on the total number of bogeys in a single 🧾 round of a tournament.
Naturally, you can do a similar thing in football, and you don’t even have to bet on 🧾 the score of the game. You could bet over/under the number of corner kicks, the number of yellow cards in 🧾 that same game, or something else.
Here is an example for the total over/under number of corner kicks by the Unibet 🧾 betting site with different odds:
As you can see, it’s clear that Totals bets are quite diverse. The main point, as 🧾 we’ve said, is that there is the option for you to bet over/under a specific number, and that number can 🧾 be the goals, points, bogeys, corner kicks, or anything else that the statistics of the game follow. The choice is 🧾 there, and it’s up to you to decide what you wish to wager your money on.
How do you bet with 🧾 total points?
As you can see, betting on Totals is quite simple. It’s always about betting on a total score or 🧾 the total points in a match being over or under a specific number. The bookie that you’ve chosen will likely 🧾 provide several options with exact odds, and all you need to do is select the one that you think will 🧾 be most likely to happen based on your knowledge of the sport, the match at hand, and the odds themselves.
The 🧾 act of betting on any given platform is quite simple, and it works in the same manner as all other 🧾 bets. However, bear in mind that the bets are not shown in the same form for all sports.
For example, in 🧾 sports such as football, where the score total is usually a very low number, you’ll primarily see bets in the 🧾 range of 1.5, 2.5, 3.5, and the like. On the other hand, in sports like basketball, Totals can be much 🧾 higher.
Here is an example of a basketball match presented by MansionBet where you can see that Totals is set at 🧾 210.5. This means that the total score in the game needs to be over 210 or under 210 points.
Since the 🧾 actual betting is quite straightforward, you need to consider things that aren’t. Totals, like all other bets, have specific numbers 🧾 that are more likely to occur, while others are almost useless for punters.
A bookie will often offer sucker bets that 🧾 are there to take your money, and you need to make sure that you avoid them. It’s important to know 🧾 the sport, and what is likely to occur in the match that you’re betting on. You can focus on the 🧾 odds, but then you’ll likely fall for some of these sucker bets, because bookies can easily adjust odds to look 🧾 better to punters, while the actual thing that you’re betting on is unlikely to occur.
Conclusion
As you can see, Totals are 🧾 fairly straightforward bets. They are easy to learn and master. You don’t have to favour a specific team, and you 🧾 don’t have to think about a wide variety of possibilities. You only need to focus on the total score of 🧾 the game or some other point total, and wager on it being over or under a specific number.
The whole point 🧾 is knowing the sport that you’re betting on and understanding what the most common score totals are in that sport. 🧾 If you are a fan of a specific sport, Totals bets might be the way to go for you. We 🧾 hope that this guide will help you to understand them better so that you can start using Totals when betting 🧾 on your favourite betting site.
