By Loot, Sports Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Sprint Cup Championship Odds
There can be a lot of benefits in making NASCAR futures bets in Sprint Cup racing. At root, you pick who will win the Sprint Cup Championship. You can bet at any point during the racing season. But for those who really want to go out on a limb, these bets are available even before they drop the green flag for the Daytona 500.
Every driver will be listed with odds to express the probabilities of that driver winning the Cup. The odds can cover the entire gamut–from monstrous longshots to safer bets involving the customary top candidates to win the Cup. Depending on the situation, it may be better to bet as early as you can. If picking more of a longshot, you don’t want to bet it after that driver shows he has a legitimate chance because the odds will not be as good as they would have been before. But for a big favorite, maybe it’s better to see if that driver struggles, then bet it when the odds are higher. It depends on the situation.
Most Nascar wagering revolves around individual races. You pick a driver to win the race. Or maybe just to beat another driver. In a one-race window, your predictive abilities are cheapened to some extent. As we all know, there are any number of things that could spoil a good bet and a lot of it is both outside our predictive ability and the driver’s control.
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Over the course of the entire racing season, you can recover from these unfortunate incidents. A driver we bet can wreck and it’s not the end of the world because there are still dozens of races left to make up for that. In just a single race, a bet can easily lose off of some unforeseeable circumstance. In a way, projecting how a driver will do for the whole year is a truer reflection of our predictive abilities than just betting on a singular race, where anything can happen and there is no ability to absorb a setback.
In other words, bettors generally have a better grip on the big picture than they do on all the little individual parts of the puzzle. When someone asks you how a driver will do this upcoming season, you will look at the big picture as a whole, as opposed to sweating individual races where anything can and will happen. Futures bets on who will win the Sprint Cup are just more conducive to how people tend to look at racing. Not to imply there aren’t good spots to bet on in individual races. It’s just that the big picture is more along the lines of how people look at racing and the different drivers.
When making individual bets on singular races, we plunk down our money and we get action for several hours. Then it’s over. Fair enough, but when making futures wagers on who will win the Cup, the action lasts for months and months. You can put down a bet for as little as $2 and have a vested stake in a driver that lasts virtually all season. You have a reason to root for that driver for all the races–not just one race. It lasts months and is a bet that offers a ton of mileage.
The odds are pretty easy to understand for the most part. Most Nascar futures are expressed in the fractional form, like the following…
Odds to Win the 2014 Sprint Cup Championship
Jimmie Johnson 13/4
Dale Earnhardt, Jr. 5/1
Kevin Harvick 15/2
Above you see 3 drivers listed with odds to win the Cup. The easiest one is Earnhardt, Jr., who is listed at 5/1, meaning you win 5 for every 1 you bet. Jimmie Johnson is 13/4, which is just a tad over 3/1, or 3.25-to-1 to be exact. Harvick is 15/2, which is right between 7 and 8-to-1, or 7.5-to-1.
Let’s face it, a lot of Cup champions are drivers who were among the favorites to win the championship. At the same time, there are enough longshots that have won over the years. It allows you to capitalize off any insight you may have as far as a driver being able to make a big leap to the top spot. Some years, the Cup champion doesn’t pay a bundle because most people thought he was going to win the Cup or was among the top candidates. But every once in a while, a driver that very few people fancied ends up shocking the world and winning the cup. When able to sense when that is coming, Nascar futures can be an exciting and rewarding way to capitalize off your knowledge and handle of the sport.
