When looking at sports, games, and athletes to bet on, there are a lot of considerations that bettors must make, whether they’re casual bettors looking to make some quick and easy fun money or veteran gamblers who have built their careers around sports betting.
Those considerations can and should differ greatly for each bettor. You’ll have the subjective that are unique to each individual (and even to certain situations or types of bets): knowledge of a specific sport, a particular feeling like you have an edge over a certain book or odds listing, having inside knowledge of a team or league, etc.
And then you’ll have the objective considerations that are relatively fixed across each respective sport: number of daily matchups, availability of prop bets, consistency of results within a particular sport, etc.
When it comes to betting on the NHL, one of the objectively positive considerations for a consistent bettor is the sheer amount of betting you can do. With an 82-game season and a 20-player active roster for each team (in a 32-team league), the amount of daily & weekly options can feel seemingly limitless, and they in turn give each bettor far more opportunities to find their perfect line or odds.
Of course, with an overabundance of possibilities also comes a lot of noise to filter through. But the educated & prepared bettor can check out an aggregation platform like OddsJam to find the best NHL odds and in doing so, they can maximize their successes and minimize their losses when betting on the NHL. Click here to get more info.
Finding the Best NHL Prop Bets
There are a lot of ways to find the best value for NHL betting, beyond just betting on game results or the puck line.
Because hockey is a relatively low-scoring sport, the most likely value that you’ll find is going to come from specific prop bets, either player focused (such as Alex Ovechkin to score o1.5 goals) or team focused (such as the Washington Capitals to score o3.5 goals or for the Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins to combine for o5.5 goals).
Since the lines for these prop bets can differ across different sportsbooks, odds aggregators take the pressure off of individual users to manually search around for the best bets and the best lines, and they curate and categorize the best NHL odds all in one easy-to-find place.
The reality is that sportsbooks are competing against each other to be your primary destination for NHL odds and may also have some slight differences in how they’re calculating the odds for a particular bet – so a bettor who wants to maximize their profits and minimize their expenses is going to use a betting tool or odds aggregator to find the absolute best odds available, with the best juice according to each sportsbook.
Let’s use an example to illustrate this point: if Caesars has Ovechkin at +1200 for o1.5 goals but FanDuel has the same bet available for +1300, users who only use Caesars and haven’t started accounts elsewhere will be locked into a bet that is less valuable than one they can get at a different book. Their chance of success with the bet is the same, but their potential return isn’t as significant.
However, if they were to visit and scan through an odds aggregator, they would see both sets of odds, and would be able to quickly and easily jump over to FanDuel and place their bet, maximizing their potential profit while requiring no additional expense on their part.
If that bet cashed, a user who placed that bet on Caesars would have a total payout of $1,300, but a bettor who placed that bet with FanDuel would have a total payout of $1,400.
In that situation, taking a few moments to use a betting tool and/or odds aggregator to find the most ideal line netted that person an extra $100 that they wouldn’t have otherwise had, which they can then use to roll into another bet. And it didn’t cost them a thing.
Using An Odds Aggregator to get the Best Puck Lines
Another interesting aspect of NHL betting is the puck line, or the spread in hockey betting.
As mentioned, hockey is a particularly low-scoring sport and with that comes a significant potential for shutouts and/or games with final scores as low as 1-0, 2-1 or 3-2.
Due to that, the spread is always +1.5 goals for the underdog and -1.5 goals for the favorite, with additional juice to each line being dependent on particular sportsbooks and matchups. Since the spread options are relatively limited across each game, finding the best puck line via an odds aggregator is the key to maximizing your potential return on a bet.
Let’s take a playoff matchup between the Edmonton Oilers and Los Angeles Kings as an example here; the main line for this matchup is Oilers +1.5 and Kings -1.5.
An educated bettor can utilize an odds aggregator to find that different books have the Kings +1.5 available as low as +150 and as high as +175, while the Oilers -1.5 can be found as high as -185 or as low as -213. There’s such a significant difference in juice on those lines that, regardless of which result someone may think is more likely, the smartest option is to place their bets with the sportsbook that offers them the best odds for their expected result.
To maximize the value when finding NHL odds, it’s in the best interest of any bettor, casual or otherwise, to utilize an odds aggregator for comparing lines, finding differences in prop bets, and taking advantage of the variations in juice that different sportsbooks put on their respective odds in order to incentivize bettors to pick their book and certain results.
Picking what bet you’d like to make is up to each bettor, but maximizing the value and reducing the risk of that bet can be done simply and easily using an odds aggregator and the odds comparison tools available to you.