How To Bet On MLS?

Two of the fastest growing industries around the world right now are sports betting and soccer, and the MLS is the perfect place to enjoy both! If you want to know how to bet on MLS, this is the right page to be on. Our soccer betting guidelines will give you the competitive edge, and we also provide you with picks and predictions so you don’t have to do the work yourself!

There are tons of sports to bet on out there, so why choose MLS soccer as the sport to make your wagers on? It’s a fair question, so it’s one we felt we needed to answer—because there is an answer. Before we move on to how to bet on MLS, we’ll explain why it’s worth it by listing a few of the benefits.

• Availability → If there aren’t any sportsbooks that have available bets on your sport, that pretty much shuts down any betting opportunities, obviously. That’s why MLS is a great option: they’re everywhere. It’s one of the fastest growing leagues in the world and you’d be hard-pressed to find a respectable sportsbook that not only doesn’t have MLS bets, but doesn’t have a wide variety too.
• Bonuses & Promotions → As one of the fastest-growing sports leagues in the world and especially in North America today, MLS is in a unique spot because it’s growing alongside the industry of sports betting. Because of how much it’s grown and continued to grow in recent years, sportsbooks often offer more bonuses and promotions for the MLS than they might for other sports.
• Wide Variety Of Markets → Sportsbooks also offer a nice variety of MLS betting markets to choose from, which allows sharp bettors to find themselves a good, smart value bet nearly every time. Your preferred sportsbook is likely to offer any soccer prop you can think up for an MLS game.
• BetPicks.ca Free Picks → Another big reason to consider learning how to bet on MLS is that you can make easy money with BetPicks.ca’s weekly free picks. MLS is similar to the NFL in that they play once a week, and most teams play on the same day, Saturday, every week. With that in mind, we’ll usually have our free picks ready for you to take advantage of by Thursday or Friday.
• Parlay Opportunities → There are also tons of opportunities for lucrative parlays when betting on the MLS as well. As we mentioned, there are quite a bevy of MLS betting markets out there, which allows bettors with a keen eye to nearly always find at least a good pair of markets to parlay together.
• Better Odds → As is the case with other soccer leagues when comparing to the Big 4 North American sports, the MLS offers much better Moneyline odds. The reason for this is simple: the draw. Whereas there are only two outcomes for most sports (one team wins, or the other team wins), there are three for soccer (one team wins, the other team wins, or it’s a draw), which predictably raises the odds for all three. The more options there are, the higher the odds will be for each individual option.

The main point of this page is to help bettors of all shapes, sizes, and experience levels to learn enough about how to bet on MLS so that they can go out there and not only enjoy their MLS betting experience but have some success with it as well. Before we get into the nitty gritty, we’re going to help get you started with a very basic step-by-step breakdown of how you can get your MLS betting journey started.

• Choose your preferred sportsbook. Some considerations for this choice include: how good the odds are compared to competitors, their variety of MLS markets, ease of use, ease of deposit/withdrawal, safety and security, additional features, and more.
• Set up an account on a said sportsbook. This should be rather simple, and if you’ve chosen it properly, the section where you input your financial info to make your first deposit should be easy and leave you feeling secure.
• Make your first deposit. If your sportsbook is offering a welcome bonus on your initial deposit, try to take as much advantage of that as possible.
• Find the MLS section of your sportsbook and surf the matches and markets.
• Choose a market you’d like to bet on, but don’t go into this willy-nilly. If you’re not following our expert free picks, it’s important to do your own research into recent trends, injury news, statistics, weather, and more to help determine what makes a good bet to you on that particular day.
• Make your bet. After you’ve chosen a market using your MLS betting strategies, now it’s time to put your money where your mouth is and put a bet down. Deciding how much to put down is completely up to you, but if you plan on betting often, it’s smart to come up with a bankroll for the season and use about 1 percent of that bankroll (also known as a unit) on each individual bet you make, whether parlay or single bet. The higher odds of parlays can make people fall in love, but don’t waste a really good hunch by pairing it with another market you’re just throwing in to boost odds. Parlays are fun, but only in moderation.

Now that we know how to get on the MLS betting horse, we can start talking about the details of the different betting types you’ll find while searching the web, as well as how to understand betting odds. There are tons of different betting types and combos, but for our purposes, we’re going to stick to the most prevalent betting types.

The first of these is the most simple, the outright match winner. An outright match winner bet is a wager on the final outcome of any given match. With MLS, there are three options: Team A to win, Team B to win, or Draw. Simply predict the result of the game correctly, and your bet will be a winner.

Another common bet in soccer is the Double Chance wager because there are three outcomes instead of two. The Double Chance allows you to bet on two outcomes at once. For any given match, your Double Chance options will be: Team A or Draw (Team A won’t lose), Team B or Draw (Team B won’t lose), and Team A or Team B (match will not be a draw). This gives you more security on your bet, but the odds are also lowered for this reason.

There are also totals bets, when you’re betting on how many total goals will be scored in a match. The sportsbook will give you a decimal number (eg: 3.5, 4.5, 5.5) and you have to decide to bet on whether the match’s goal total will go over or under that number. If you bet over 3.5 on a game and there are three goals, you lose, but if there are four, you win.

Player Props are bets reserved more for those that are well-informed not just on teams overall but on players individually as well. A player prop allows you to bet on any singular outcome for a player such as whether they’ll score, when they’ll score, how many they’ll score, whether they’ll commit a foul, whether they’ll be booked, etc.

Multi-Bets, Accumulators, or Parlays are another kind of bet you can make on the MLS. Basically, it consists of grouping several markets together into one bet that offers much higher risk and much higher reward.

Outright betting allows you to bet on long-term propositions. For the MLS, these include bets on who will win the league, who will be top scorer, and other such results that will take a much longer time to be decided. Because of the long time between when the bet is made and when it will be settled, the odds are much higher in outright markets.

MLS Betting Odds

Odds are the most important thing to understand when it comes to betting because that’s how you determine whether or not a market is offering value. Odds are basically the implied probability of any given betting market.

In Canada, Decimal Odds are the most common, which is lucky because they’re the simplest as well. Your stake is already included in the calculations, so no need to worry about that like you do with other systems. To find your total payout, simply multiply the Decimal Odds by how much your wagering. Higher decimal numbers mean better odds, lower decimal numbers mean worse odds. Nice and easy.

For American odds it’s a little more complicated but still rather easy. If you’re dealing with plus (+) odds, the number you see is how much you’d win on a $100 bet, and if you’re dealing with minus (-) odds, the number you see is how much you need to wager to win $100. Minus odds offer less reward and less risk, plus odds offer more reward and more risk.

Parlays, also referred to as accumulators and combo bets and multi bets, are one of the most popular ways to bet on sports these days. The reason for that is because they offer such lucrative odds. While parlays can be fun when they hit, they very rarely do, as their high odds (which imply low probability) rarely result in winning wagers.

A parlay is created when a bettor combines two or more individual markets into one bet with higher risk and higher reward. What makes it so risky is that every leg of your parlay needs to win or else you lose everything. For example, if you have a 12-leg parlay and you hit 11 of those legs, your bet is still a loser just as much as someone who got one out of two on their parlay is a loser despite how many markets you predicted correctly.

A smart way to use parlays is to find a couple of sure-thing markets that you like but that have odds so low that it wouldn’t be worth it to bet on as a single. You then combine those terrible odds together and you get much more value for your wager while still only counting on two very likely outcomes.

It’s great to go out there and gather your own knowledge on how to bet MLS soccer, but we’ve also got you covered here at BetPicks.ca with our weekly free expert MLS picks. Free picks are betting picks made by experts and sharps that are generously shared with the public for free. We do all the necessary research to make sure our picks are winners.

We’re watching as much MLS soccer as we can, we’re following all of the stats closely, we’re reading analysis on how different teams play and applying that to a betting setting, we’re staying up-to-date on player injury news, we’re noting scheduling changes, and we’re staying abreast of recent playing trends. If you’re looking for a free MLS pick, look no further.

Statistics are always an important indicator of how a team or player has been doing, so it’s important to regularly check MLS stats. Past results are usually some of the best indicators of future performance, which is why they’re a great tool for betting.

Unfortunately for soccer fans, there aren’t a ton of tangible stats to look at apart from goals, assists, minutes played, possession, and bookings. These can still be hugely useful for wagering on goal totals, for example knowing that two teams score a ton, you’d want to bet the over on the total for that game. Seeing that a player is on a hot goal-scoring streak is another statistical trend that could lead to betting success.

It’s important to have a plan and a strategy when learning how to bet on MLS, so we’ve listed below a few of our favorite tried and true MLS betting strategies to help you get off to a good start.

BetPicks.ca Free MLS Picks

One of the best ways to ensure your betting success while spending the least amount of time studying stats and trends and injury reports is to simply allow us to do it for you through our Free MLS Picks. We do all the necessary preparation for each of our Free MLS Picks, so you can count on us to come with successful bets that always offer good value.

Focus On One Team

It’s easy to be overwhelmed with all that’s going on throughout an MLS season with its whopping 28-team field, so we like to simply focus on one team for a large of chunk of the season. This allows you to become an expert on said team, which in turn allows you to pinpoint value when betting on that team. If you’re an unemotional expert on a team, betting success will come much easier.

Shop Lines & Bonuses

You’re not married to any sportsbook, so shopping lines and bonuses is pretty much always a positive for the bettor. Shopping lines refers to when a bettor will decide on which market they like, then check out the odds that market has on several different sportsbooks, thereby allowing them to find the most value on their bet. The same goes with finding the most lucrative bonuses/offers

Online sports betting is nothing without the online sportsbooks, so we’ve done our due diligence in scouring the web for the best all-around sports betting sites with which to do your betting. What makes a good sportsbook, you ask? We’ve listed our main criteria below our list of the top 15 online sportsbooks for MLS betting.

Sportsbook Criteria

• Safety → When you’re putting your own money on the line you want to make sure that it’s secure, so the most important thing above all else is the safety and security of the sportsbook. Going with a bigger, more reputable sportsbook will ensure the safety of your money.
  Bonuses/Offers → However, those safer, more reputable sportsbooks don’t have the need to attract bettors, so they offer far fewer betting bonuses and offers to their customers. If you’re big into taking advantage of offers and bonuses, simply find the offer that speaks to you, and roll with the sportsbook offering it.
• Navigation → Is the sportsbook easy to use? Is the interface easy to understand? Do they have a well-functioning mobile app/site? Can you find your MLS markets without too much fuss? This is all about the look and ease of use of the sportsbook, so it’s really up to personal preference.
• Deposit/Withdrawal → You can’t bet without any money, so ensuring that the sportsbook you choose is compatible with your preferred banking method is of the utmost importance when making this choice.
• Market Variety → How many MLS betting markets does this sportsbook offer? Do they offer a good variety of different kinds of bets and props for each match? Are they more focused on other sports at the expense of their MLS coverage?
• Odds → Odds are important because they decide how much money you win on your bets. If you’re continuously betting with a sportsbook whose MLS odds are much less lucrative for you than a competitor, you could be losing potential money with each bet you make.