How to Bet on March Madness 2024: A Step-by-Step Guide

March Madness is the second-biggest betting event of the year after the Super Bowl. But instead of one game to bet, you get 63 games to bet on March Madness. 63! With that many opportunities, you’ll need to create a March Madness betting strategy of some sort. “Winging it” won’t amount to the most profits, believe us. But hey, that’s what we’re here for. We’ve created this in-depth March Madness betting guide and packed all the must-know things you should be aware of. There’s a lot of ground to cover so let’s get to it:

How To Bet March Madness

First things first, there are multiple ways for how to bet on March Madness. Perhaps that’s the best way to begin this guide. Here are the most common sport bet types:

Moneyline

The easiest NCAAB bet of all — who wins the game being played. That’s really all there is to this bet. Just pick the side you think will advance on. Easy enough, right?

Point Spreads

This is the most common NCAA Tournament basketball bet. Bookies will assign a points handicap to each team. The favorites have to win by a certain amount of points to cash in the wager, while the opposite applies for the underdog, who can’t lose by more than its point spread. However, the underdog can also cover the spread by outright winning the matchup.

Over/Under Points

Forget who wins or loses, the over/under wager is strictly about how many points are scored in total by the teams. Sports betting sites set a number and it’s simply on bettors to pick “over” or “under” that amount when wagering.

Futures Bet

These wagers are strictly concerned with future outcomes as it pertains to the tourney. An easy example is betting who actually wins the national championship or reaches the Final Four.

Prop Bets

Sports bettors can open Pandora’s box with prop bets. See, props can really be anything and everything that happens inside a game. There are player props based on individual stat performances such as the over/under rebounds for someone. Team props are practically the same but stretched out to everyone’s profane — not one player (e.g. over/under on turnovers). On any given March Madness game, the prop market will offer the most bets of all.

March Madness Betting Tips

All right, this is probably the section you came for — how do you actually win at NCAA tourney betting? Look, there’s no advice that works 100 percent of the time. There’s a reason this thing is called March Madness — it’s supposed to be wild and unpredictable. Still, you can play the probabilities and bet based on what’s likely to happen, bracket-busting upset or not. Here are a few grade-A betting tips we’ve learned the hard way when wagering the tourney:

Don’t Fall In Love With Cinderellas

“Cinderella teams” take ALL the mindshare during tournament time. It’s the reason why the NCAA Tournament is so popular cause there’s usually one or two teams that make a deep run seemingly out of nowhere. Bettors and bracket pickers get obsessive about figuring out who the next Cinderella teams will be and how long they can last.

However, it’s probably not worth your time. The reality is the overwhelming majority of the lower-seeded teams get bounced when they should against higher seeds. The teams that do make it through become textbook examples of “survivorship bias.” We won’t get too much into the psychology weeds here, but that bias is a common mental fallacy among humans, whether they’re betting or not.

All this is to say don’t overestimate the probability of upsets just because one Cinderella team gets all the tourney buzz. You’ll go broke finding bracket-busting picks cause they’re not as common as you probably think.

Value Recent Play

So much of March Madness success hinges on momentum. It’s very much about “who’s hot” at the right time. That’s why when you’re evaluating matchups to bet on, it probably does you no good to dig up how X team played in December or even January. Most of that is futile by now thanks to injuries, coaching adjustments, and mental confidence.

Instead, overweigh how a team or specific player finished the regular season and into the conference tournament. That will give you a far better grasp on which teams and players are trending up, and which are downtrending. More often than not, those trends follow into the NCAA Tournament.

Pinpoint Difference Makers

Basketball, more than other team sports like football or hockey, can be “taken over” by one player. That’s just a byproduct of only 10 players being on the court at a time. So in other words, superstar players matter in the tournament. Big time.

The NCAA Tournament is ripe with historical examples of single players willing their teams to deep postseason runs. Steph Curry at Davidson and Kemba Walker at UConn immediately come to mind. You’d be wise to find which players have the capability to do the same this year.

Where To Bet On March Madness?

You know what type of March Mandess bets await. You also have some expert betting advice to fall back on. Now what? Welp, you got to get to actually betting and not just talking about it. It’s not like you don’t have sportsbook options to bet on March Madness.

Regulated sportsbooks like DraftKings, ESPN Bet, Fanstics, or FanDuel are certainly options. However, we’d argue your betting money best belongs in offshore sites instead. Offshore bookies offer more betting markets and payment methods like crypto than regulated counterparts, who are heavily restricted in some areas. For a list of the best offshore betting sites, take a gander at this list:

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