Five Reasons Why Smart Bettors Use Multiple Sportsbooks

Multiple Sportsbooks

As you get started with sports betting, you’re likely to have several questions that help you figure out your betting style. One of the most common ones can make a big difference for new bettors in their early success: should you stick to one sportsbook or try out multiple options?

If you’re living in a state where sports betting is legal, you’ve likely got more options for your betting dollars than you can count. And that’s one reason why it’s always better to get familiar with multiple sportsbooks and use them to your advantage. As long as sportsbooks are going to compete for your money, you’ve got a few edges that you can use on them to give yourself an upper hand.

Here are a few good reasons why savvy sports bettors set up accounts with multiple sportsbooks, rather than restricting themselves to one.

📈Getting the Best Lines
💰Taking Advantage of Promos
📊Different Options
📋Different Rules
🕒Timing the Market
✅Conclusion

Getting the Best Lines

Sportsbooks are not a monolith. They each have their own algorithms, their own group of experts setting lines and their own sharp bettors that affect each line. Most of them have similar information, but they don’t all view it in the same manner.

And that means that when you use multiple sportsbooks, you’ve got an advantage. You can compare different sportsbooks for the same game to make sure that you’re getting the best line whenever you want to place a bet.

Sometimes, that might mean an extra point in your favor. If FanDuel has the Kansas City Chiefs giving 3.5 points against the Buffalo Bills, but DraftKings only has the Chiefs laying 3, you’ll be in much better shape taking the Bills at FanDuel than you would at DraftKings. In that hypothetical, a 3-point Kansas City win would become a push at DraftKings, while FanDuel would be paying you winnings. A half-point might seem small, but it can make a real difference in your betting success.

Other times, you might get the same bet, but at different odds. For example, if BetMGM has the New York Mets to beat the Atlanta Braves at +150 and Caesars has the Mets at +160, a $100 bet on the Mets would give you an extra $10 in profit at Caesars. That extra money in your bankroll goes a long way in helping you profit in the long run. Remember, sports betting is hard, and anything you can do to improve your odds and potential winnings even slightly makes a big difference.

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Taking Advantage of Promos

Sportsbooks have several ways to compete with each other, and one of their favorites is by offering different promotional offers to bettors. This can come in two different forms: offers for new players and offers for existing players.

If you’ve been watching sporting events at all in the past five years, you’ve probably seen a commercial advertising a sportsbook’s promotional offer. These offers come when you sign up and make your first deposit at a sportsbook where you’ve never held an account before. At some sportsbooks, you receive bet credits automatically when you make your first bet. Others might wait until you make your first bet and then give you a free bet if your first bet doesn’t win.

Either way, these offers can help you fund your gambling efforts. By getting bonus bet credits, you can build your bankroll with the sportsbook’s funds. Let’s say that you sign up for a promotion that gives you $200 in bet credits when you place a wager of at least $5. If you’re betting $20 per wager, that’s 10 bets that the sportsbook is giving you just for signing up. If you win half of them, you’ve likely taken home at least $100 of their money without having to bet anything yourself.

The other way to use promotions is when they’re offered to existing players. These can be one-off offerings or regular promo plays where the sportsbook provides better odds for all of its customers. Examples include DraftKings offering a boosted bet on every game of Week 1 of the NFL season, BetRivers providing a profit boost on parlay plays or FanDuel’s Spread the Love play, where they moved the spread a half-point in favor of the local team for every 1,000 people who bet on them. In one case, FanDuel had Indiana getting 111.5 points against Michigan State. Obviously, everyone who backed the Hoosiers cashed in with ease that night.

Each sportsbook has its own offerings to customers, and the only way to take advantage is by having multiple sportsbook accounts at your disposal. If you’ve got a good mix of sportsbooks, you’ll likely have plenty of promo opportunities that can help you earn profit.

Different Options at Different Sportsbooks

This might surprise you, but not every betting option is available at every sportsbook. Each sportsbook chooses what action they want to take on each game, and on more niche options, the available markets can wildly vary.

If you’ve hopped onto ESPNBet, you might have noticed one unique market to this sportsbook: it’s the only book that lets you bet on specific players to not score a touchdown. Every book will let you bet on someone to score, but only ESPNBet allows the opposite.

Other books might throw in some season-long prop bets that are only available on their sportsbook. With Bayern Munich having won 11 consecutive Bundesliga titles, BetMGM offered a different futures market for German soccer: pick the winner of the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich excluded from the table. Essentially, that meant bettors were picking the second-place team if Bayern won the title again or the league champion if Bayern’s run finally ended. If you wanted to place such a wager, BetMGM had the only market for it.

Different Rules at Different Sportsbooks

Not every sportsbook treats every result the same. Sometimes, that’s because of a promotion, while other times it’s because of the book’s rules.

For example, PointsBet was the place to bet on Premier League matches for years because of a simple promotion. If your team went up by two goals, in the eyes of PointsBet, the match was over and you were a winner. At other books, 2-0 could become 2-2, which grades as a loss in soccer bets to win.

BetMGM doesn’t have a specific promotion attached to golf, but it does apply “no dead heat” for golf positioning bets, which no other book does. If you take a golfer to finish in the top 20 and he finishes tied for 20th with three other golfers, you’ll get your payout reduced at most sportsbooks. Not so at BetMGM, which pays you the full amount of your original stake. If you took a golfer at 20-1 to place in the top 20, BetMGM pays out the full 20 times your original bet. Other books in that scenario might give you just five times your wager back, as the dead-heat rules reduced the prize by that factor. Obviously, that’s a major difference to your bankroll.

Timing the Market

Just like with stocks, timing the market with sports betting can be a key to your success. When you see a valuable line, you want to get your money down before the sharp bettors have a chance to set the market. Once they get in there, the sportsbook knows where the money’s going and will adjust the lines accordingly.

However, having multiple sportsbooks available helps because they won’t all react at the same time. Sometimes, one book either jumps the gun compared to the others or drags behind. These are the times when an astute gambler can jump on the book that hasn’t changed the lines yet and get their money down.

For example, if you see five books that have the Boston Celtics giving 4.5 points to the New York Knicks and one book that has the line at Boston -4, you need to jump on the Celtics if you like them before the number moves.

Additionally, not every sportsbook comes out at the same time. Finding the book that gets its line out first can either give you the chance to set your bet or an idea of what number you need to look for to make a smart wager. Either way, tracking which sportsbook gets its lines out first helps you maximize your winnings.

Conclusion: Winning By Diversifying

Limiting yourself to one market might be easy, but it’s a bad long-term strategy. If you limit yourself to only one market, you could miss out on the best odds and promotions because your book chose not to offer them. By giving yourself multiple options, you’re forcing sportsbooks to keep competing for your attention and dollars every day. When sportsbooks have to compete for bettors, bettors have the upper hand.