Tipico Tips: Betting the CBB futures market

The best way to get a big score betting on college basketball’s March Madness is to hit a futures bet. Last week we discussed the best ways to bet on individual games for the upcoming NCAA Basketball tournament. You can check that article out if you missed it. This week, we have the beginning of the conference tournaments as well as the overall draw for the upcoming NCAA tournament. Both events offer us a chance to dive into the futures market and get some nice prices for backing the teams we think can make deep runs. 

Futures markets are not as complicated as they sound. Basically, they are a way to bet on some future event. For this week in NCAA basketball, those future events are the championships of their respective conferences and the overall champion of the NCAA tournament. Futures bets differ from straight game wagers in that you tend to have more options. In a game between Duke and North Carolina, you can only have one winner. In a conference tournament, you have anywhere from 8-14 teams that have varying chances to win it. The more options, the more spread out the chances of winning are for each individual team. The lower the chances for any individual team to win, the higher the odds for all of them will be. This is why futures markets are exciting. The Virginia Cavaliers are the shortest odds in the ACC tournament, as an example, at +220. In every individual game they play, you will be laying -200 or more to get them. That means you will only get paid about 50 cents on the dollar for any bets you make on them at -200 for an individual game. If you want a better payout than that, you can take them in the futures market at +220, meaning for every dollar you bet, you receive $2.20 in profit if they win the championship. Most pundits think the only team that can beat them is Florida State, the second shortest-priced team. Even in that game, if both make it through, you will not get anywhere near +220 on Virginia if you wait until that gameday. You do need them to win their early-round games here to get there, but that’s not a massive risk to take given the difference in payouts from -200 to +220 if you are correct. 

These conference tournaments have about a dozen different options with a chance to win. The overall NCAA tournament has 68 (field of 64 plus four play-in games). That means you get even better odds on taking a team to win that tournament. You also take on more risk. The NCAA tournament requires more wins than a conference tournament to make it to the finals. You also have the competition boost as the NCAA tournament has no bad teams and literally the best of the best the country has to offer. Now, the favorites are going to be shorter prices still, but even those shorter prices are going to pay somewhere around 3-1 to 8-1. If we get a longshot winner that starts off as a No. 3 seed or lower, you could easily see double-digit odds of 10-1 or higher for them to win. If you have a strong feeling on a team making a run to the championship, you should make sure to get a wager down. This also works if you have a strong feeling against one of the favorites or top-seeded teams in a bracket. If you happen to think Iowa could be a fugazi top seed with one of their best shooters going down with an injury last weekend, you can get some pretty healthy odds on the other teams in that bracket if you are right. We still have a week of conference tournaments and a NCAA bracket draw before we really know who the dark horses might be, but the sooner you get the bet down on or against certain teams, the better the odds are likely to be for a bigger payday if you are correct. 

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