How to Bet on MMA
by Predictem.com Staff
If MMA/UFC fights weren’t exciting enough! Now you can bet on them too! This article will explain how to bet on the fights as well as where you can place wagers online.
How to Bet MMA
If already know HOW to bet on fights and are just looking for good recommendations on places to bet online, check out our recommended MMA sportsbooks page.
Betting on fights is a bit different than your typical football or basketball wager. Those sports have point spreads to make up for difference of how much better team A is than team B.
UFC fights don’t have points, so the bookies must use “odds” in order to make up for the difference in strength between fighters. These odds are called a moneyline.
Let’s use an example so that we spell it out real clear for ya.
Let’s Forrest Griffin is a heavily favored against Tito Ortiz. The bookie can’t make both fighters even odds because Griffin has a much better shot of winning. To make up for this difference, Griffin opened as a -330 favorite and Ortiz was a +245 underdog. What does this mean?
If you’re looking at a set of odds and there’s a minus sign (-) in front of the number, that tells you who the favorite is in the matchup and how much you have to “lay” in order to win (profit) $100. In this case, if you wanted to make a bet on Forrest Griffin, you’d need to risk $330 to profit $100. (If you bet 330 and Griffin wins, you get your staked/risked amount back plus a $100 profit.)
Conversely, a plus sign (+) in front of listed odds represents the underdog in the matchup. This is the number you will profit by risking $100. If you bet 100 bucks on Ortiz and he won at +245 odds, you would stand to make 245 plus your 100 back for a total of 345.
Moneyline odds confuse many people, so don’t feel bad if it takes you a bit to understand this!
There are also other types of bets that you can make on UFC fights. These include prop bets (wagers such as how many rounds will the fight go, etc, anything not head to head over over/under related.) You can also find totals bets which doesn’t have anything to do with who wins, only if the fight goes over or under the posted number of rounds. These wagers are usually -110 for the under and -110 for the under. This means that you will need to risk $110 to win $100.
Before we close out this article, we’d like to note that we used $100 as an example in the bets above. You don’t have to bet 100 dollars. It can be 1.10 to win 1.00 or 11 to win 10 and so on.