Hockey Betting Guide

Hockey is known to be a Canadian sport, but that doesn’t mean other countries don’t take hockey seriously. The NHL is the highest level of hockey in the world and players from all over the world play in the NHL. The NHL has an 82-game regular season plus the playoffs to determine what team wins the Stanley Cup each season.

Most bettors that wager on hockey stick to the NHL, but there are a number of other hockey leagues and events to bet on. You can bet on the OHL, WHL, AHL, KHL and many others. There are also other popular hockey events to bet on including the World Junior Hockey Championships and the Winter Olympics tournament every four years.

How to Bet on Hockey
Hockey can be wagered on in a variety of different ways, but the best way to bet on hockey is online. Proline and other ways to bet on the NHL offer brutal payout odds compared to online sportsbooks. Another benefit of betting on hockey with a sportsbook is that you get to bet on every hockey event that you could imagine.

Canadians that want to bet on hockey have plenty of options when it comes to choosing a sportsbook. Americans don’t have that many sportsbooks that they can bet with, but Bookmaker is still a top option for American bettors. Take a look at the different ways to bet on hockey games below and make sure you read as much strategy as you can before betting too much money.

Types of Hockey Bets

The most common type of bet in the NHL is a moneyline bet, which is where the bettor needs to pick what hockey team will win the game. Sportsbooks also offer moneyline odds for the 1st period rather than a full game and if you bet in-play you can wager on the moneyline during almost any point of a hockey game.

In hockey you can also bet on the puckline. A puckline bet is the same as a point spread bet in the NFL. You need to pick a team to win by a certain number of goals or to not lose by a certain number of goals. The most common puckline bet in the NHL is -1.5 / +1.5 goals, which means that the favoured team (-) needs to win the game by 2 or more goals.

Another common type of wager in hockey is an over/under bet. With an over/under bet you need to bet on whether the hockey game will have more of fewer goals than the posted goal total. Most bettors bet on game totals, but you can also bet on team totals or single period goal totals to make things even more interesting.

With the moneyline odds in NHL and other hockey leagues often high bettors need to look for ways to decrease the juice that they need to risk. When you have 2-3 favourites that you want to bet you can limit your risk exposure by betting on a parlay, but parlays only win when you predict every outcome on your wager correctly.

Prop bets aren’t as popular in the NHL, but you can bet on them with every major sportsbook. A type of prop bet would be betting on Crosby to score a goal against the Flyers in his next game. The problem with NHL prop bets is that they’re very hard to handicap, as you never know when a player is going to score. You need to basically follow hot streaks.

Futures bets aren’t that popular, but I recommend looking at the different options. You can bet on what hockey team you predict will win certain events in the future such as the Stanley Cup. You can also bet on the NHL teams that you think will win each division or conference.

Betting on hockey is a very easy sport to wager on. In case you’ve never bet on the NHL we’re going to look at a quick example of a moneyline bet to show you exactly how to understand NHL odds. A moneyline bet at any sportsbook will look like the bet below and other types of NHL bets will look the exact same.

Anaheim Ducks +125 vs. New York Rangers -135

To read NHL moneyline odds you need to remember one key piece of information. Negative (-) odds tell the bettor how much they need to bet to win $100 while positive odds (+) reflect how much you can win on a $100 bet. With the odds above we can see that we’d need to bet $135 to win $100 on the Rangers or $100 to win $125 on the Ducks. The favoured team always has negative odds while the underdog always has positive odds.