The Asian Handicap in Soccer Betting

Most sportsbooks now offer a service that allows gamblers to place bets using a variety of criteria. This service is now usually offered across pretty much any online betting website. Many of these services are based on different types of combinations and mathematical formulas, so the user must find one that works.

One betting market in particular that has become more and more popular is Asian Handicapping. What exactly is an Asian handicap? What does it mean for soccer bettors? Should you jump straight into this form of betting? That’s what we’re all hoping to answer today.

What is an Asian handicap?

If you are unfamiliar with the term, the concept of Asian handicap betting markets is relatively simple. Betting exchanges where members place bets on the most likely result of a football match based on the point spread and regardless if the player or team is on a lesser advantage.

Unlike other sports betting options, the Asian handicap removes the draw or tie option from the choices, giving the underdog a better shot of being picked by the bettors. Most online sports betting websites or bookmakers would try to boost the likelihood of the underdogs getting a fair number of bets.

It’s not that hard to see why online bookies would do this. First and foremost, clear favorites would completely throw the balance between two sides, leaving the other with pretty much less, or worse, no bets at all. This betting system takes away this problem and encourages a balanced number of bets across the board.

Why it exists

Asian Handicap sports betting is a no-risk proposition. In this betting system, either the favored athlete will win outright or lose by the specified margin.

While Asian handicapping is mostly applied to football betting, some sports are getting this handicapping treatment from the oddsmakers and bookmakers themselves. The point of handicapping is to ensure that the amount of revenue is potentially optimized on either side of the betting options.

Basically, for sports betting sites, they would not want to alienate the fans who are rooting for the underdogs. They wanted to give those bettors a fair number of incentives all while making experienced bettors think twice about picking either of the two.

The odds spread across both teams are mostly based on the previous records and statistics of each team. It is the job of the oddsmakers to make sure that a huge chunk of bets will be evenly distributed and that the bettors who’ll pick the underdogs will be in favor, too.

Why Asian handicapping is different

Asian handicapping is different from regular betting because it doesn’t follow a system or use teams that are in line with one another. Asian handicapping is based upon the principle of spread betting and 2-way betting in which points are awarded depending on the difference in expected quality between two opposing teams.

This difference is based upon many factors including:

Asian handicapping is different from other sports betting in that it is not based upon the sum total of points made by the winning team or the losing team. Instead, it uses the point spreads to estimate the chances of each team winning or losing.

The second is the odd or single-end spread, which shows the bookmaker’s odds of one team winning and another winning at the same Singapore pools odds.

Advantages to Asian handicapping

Obviously, one of the biggest advantages of Asian handicapping is simply to “create” more competition between teams. The idea is that the more evenly matched teams, the better the overall viewing experience will be for betting customers.

Another reason is that some teams have a natural draw to win by a large score, so by placing smaller bets on these matches, the bookmakers are protecting their own interests by not giving too much attention to teams that are clearly fan favorites.