Did you know that you can bet on baseball from your mobile phone? There are a lot of mobile betting sites that allow you to bet on all sports from around the world. For the most part, this is going to work a lot easier for people who live outside of the United States.

Sites like Bet365 offers players the option to bet on everything from baseball, basketball, football, soccer, UFC, hockey and many more. They also offer a mobile betting service that you can access through most smart phones that have been created in the past 3 years. Some of the features that Bet365 offers includes Live In-Play betting and all of the Premiere League and other European Football Leagues. However, Bet365 does not currently offer services the United States.

There are a couple of US mobile sports betting sites that you can check out. While the sites suggested aren’t actually designed for your smartphone, you can visit their normal website from your mobile device and place bets like you would be able to do with a computer.

Currently, this is the off-season for baseball leagues and there isn’t very much in the way of betting on baseball. There are a couple of offseason leagues such as the Caribbean Leagues and the Australian Baseball League. But, the betting on these games isn’t very popular and you won’t find these events at many of the online sportsbooks.

Because sports betting is completely legal over in England and most of the rest of the world, the sportsbooks in the UK will often have better features such as mobile services specifically designed for iPhones and Android. These mobile betting apps are proving to be a very big success.

If we take Bet365 for example, not only do they offer in-play betting, but if you are using a iPad, iPhone or Android, you can also watch the live sporting events using their mobile app. Other sports betting sites will offer services such as live radio commentary and previews/predictions for the big games of the day.

One other thing that you will find at European sportsbooks are free bets. These free bets are normally between £/€10 and £/€25 but Bet365 offers a very large £200 bonus when you make a £200 deposit. These free bets can be used to make almost any bet on a sporting events. Some of these matchups may be disallowed from use with the bonus if the odds are too heavily stacked. The reason that they do this is because picking the heavy favourites is an easy way to try to clear the bonus without risking much.

With the season starting in a couple of days, a breakdown of run line betting and a recap of the 2008 MLB baseball season in terms of runline betting is in order.

To those new to the site or new to run line betting, a runline is a type of baseball bet.  Baseball bets usually come in 3 different types:

• Run Line - the run line is kind of like a football betting line, only in baseball games the line is always -1.5 for the straight up favorite, +1.5 for the straight up underdog.
• Money Line - the baseball money line bet is simply a bet on who will win the game.
• Over/Under - the over/under bet is a bet on how many runs both teams will score combined.  This is often called a total as well.

Run Lines have gotten popular as a way to bet heavy favorites without having to risk large amounts of money.  It is not uncommon to see the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees favored in the -200 to -300 range for a money line bet.  At -300, you would have to wager $300 to win $100.

Here is an example of the relationship between the run line and money line.  The last game of the World Series had a money line of

Philadelphia Phillies -165
Tampa Bay Devil Rays +155

and a run line of

Philadelphia Phillies -1.5 +120
Tampa Bay Devil Rays +1.5 -140

So, betting on the Phillies to win straight up, you have to wager $165 to win $100.  Betting on the Phillies to win by 1.5 runs (by 2 runs or more since there is no .5 run in a baseball game), you have to wager $100 to win $120.

The Phillies won the game 4-3, so the money line bet on the Phillies was a winner, but a run line bet on the Phillies was a loser as they only won by a run.  Tampa Bay +1.5 is a winner as they lost by 1.

A couple of things to mention to new baseball bettors with this example in mind:

• You can see the juice or the vig or whatever you want to call the sportsbooks way to make money with both of these lines.  If their was no juice you would see +165/-165 line on the money line.  But, there is a $10 difference between the two.  This is often called a “10 cent” line.

• You can see a $20 difference in the run line (-140/+120), and this is usually the norm that runlines have “20 cent” lines.
• Often times the underdog in a straight up line becomes the “favorite” in the runline, as seen by our example.

The stats below show the baseball teams records against the run line.  Wins and Losses are against the run line.  “$ On” indicates the amount you would be up or down if you bet $100 to win $xxx or $xxx to win $100, depending on if they were the favorite or the underdog.  Conversly, “$ Against” indicates if you were to bet against that team every run line game.

Anything stand out here?  Teams in bold made the playoffs, and I would assume that most of them would be on the top half of this chart.  The Twins, Astros, Cardinals, and Marlins are a little surprising to me to be up that high. The Dodgers, Brewers, and Phillies being so low is very surprising.

Remember that home teams are generally going to be favored and giving -1.5 in exchange for +xxx odds.  The Twins were very good at covering the spread as a home team, which is why they were so high up on the main chart.  Also notice that 14 of the 30 teams showed a positive return for all games.

Remember here that road teams often are getting the extra 1.5 runs, but in exchange have to put up greater odds to get them.  That is why the $ on category is so different for similar records between home and away.  Also notice that only 8 teams showed a positive return on betting all road games.

That’s it for now.  See you Sunday for opening day.

Sorry about the long delay between posts…If you have been following along, you may notice a big change in the site layout, look and feel. I never liked using that standard template, but pretty happy so far with how this turned out. Hope you like it too.

One of the other new features I am really excited about is the Live Run lines page which you can see right here - http://baseball-systems.com/live-baseball-lines/. I will be updating that page and the site over the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can look at live run lines from 5 different sportsbooks, all of which I highly recommend. The lines update automatically, no need to refresh.

On to the picks for Friday -

Florida Marlins -1.5 +160 (Value 60)

New York Mets -1.5 +110 (Value 70)

New York Yankees -1.5 -115 (Value 60)

Minnesota Twins +1.5 -135 (Value 55)

Good luck tonight.

Here is a recap of the runline betting baseball stats for 2007 (including the playoffs). This table is sorted by $ Won if you bet to win $100 per game on the run line for that baseball team. Tomorrow I will post betting against the team runline standings.

MLB Baseball Run Line system pick for Monday, March 30 - coming soon

Runline Baseball Betting - 2007