Bet £10, Get £10 - BETDAQ

What is line shopping? Should you use this strategy in 2022?

What is line shopping and should you start using this technique in your betting strategy?

Line shopping or odds shopping as I like to call it is one of the most important strategies to maximise the income from your betting.

Read on to find out more about this technique and how you can use it.

What is line shopping?

Ever visit a shop and feel you can get a better price elsewhere? Well, that’s exactly what line shopping is.

Bettors are always on the lookout for the highest value odds, the higher they are, the more money you make from a winning bet.

Line shopping is the process of searching around for the best odds offered by the bookmakers on a certain market. You could compare the prices for just a few bookies or go for a longer list.

Either way, if you don’t already use this technique it’s certainly something you should consider starting. You may be losing out on valuable profit.

Once you’ve selected a certain market to place your bets, it’s time to look for the best odds available. The better the odds you get, the more money you can ultimately make.

Line shopping has become considerably easier over the last few years. This is mainly due to the rise of the internet and sites that automatically check the latest odds for you. There’s no excuse for not looking for the best odds in the industry.

The wide range of online bookmakers

If you’re new to the betting industry, you may not know about the huge number of online bookmakers you can choose from.

If you’re just getting started you may want some advice on which bookmakers you should open accounts with. For a list of the top bookmakers, head to this article.

With such a large range, there’s bound to be various prices offered at different bookmakers. That’s perfect for line shopping and maximising your income.

Where to check the best odds

Now you know a little more about line shopping and how it works, how can you check the best odds?

There are a number of ways you can go about this. You can either use specialist websites that check the odds for you or you can manually check the odds.

Using specialist websites

Websites such as Odds Checker and Odds Portal are some of the leading odds comparison sites in the industry. These sites are incredibly easy to use and they are typically free of charge.

One thing to keep in mind is that the odds displayed may not always be up to speed.

Whilst sites make every effort to ensure their odds are up to date, the betting industry moves at an incredibly quick pace. Therefore there may be circumstances when the odds aren’t exactly right.

The best advice I can give is to check the bookmaker’s website before placing any bets.

This method is great for comparing longer lists of bookmaker odds.

Comparing odds manually

You can also manually check the odds for a certain market.

This process is fairly self-explanatory. Simply open the required bookmakers and check the odds for your chosen market. In the last minutes before an event kicks off the odds are likely to move frequently, making this process quite difficult.

Having different tabs with each bookmaker on a large screen is a great way to get around this problem.

As you can probably guess, this method works well if you’re comparing odds at one or two different bookmakers. However, this strategy becomes inefficient if you’re looking at more than three bookmakers at once.

Which bookmakers have the best odds?

If you’re interested in line shopping you’re obviously interested in finding the best odds at betting companies.

You could avoid the process above if you know which bookies generally offer the best odds.

So where should you look first?

It’s a well-known fact that betting exchanges such as Smarkets and Betfair offer the best odds to punters. That’s because they don’t need to build their profit margin into the odds.

Here’s an example from Smarkets explaining how they provide more value to punters.

You can find out more about which is the best betting exchange by checking out this article.

If you’re not interested in looking at betting exchange odds or you’re taking part in matched betting, here’s a list of some of the best bookmakers in terms of odds:

  • Bet365
  • Ladbrokes
  • Coral

Overall, it’s still advisable to shop around and look for the best odds for a given market. Some bookies may surprise you!

High street odds vs online bookmaker odds

So you know it’s important to find the best odds available on a certain market but are betting shops better than online bookmakers or vice versa?

As you may know, the high street betting shops find it incredibly hard to compete with their online counterparts. You can, therefore, predict that the high street bookies offer lower valuable odds.

You should, therefore, look online as this is where you’re likely to find the best odds. What’s more, it’s much easier using this method than taking a trip to your local bookie.

Whilst this is not going to be the case on every market, you can safely assume it’s the norm.

Line shopping in 2022

Overall, line shopping is one of the easiest techniques you can implement in your betting strategy and one that may have a significant impact on the amount of profit you make.

Serious bettors are always on the lookout for great odds offered by the bookmakers and it’s clear to see why.

Better odds equals more profit. It’s that simple!

Let me know what you think of line shopping by leaving a comment below right now.

Further reading

2019 Smarkets review
What is matched betting?