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.
