What Does Rundown Mean In Sports Betting and Wagering?
If you’ve ever talked with a mechanic and listened to them rhyme off a bunch of car parts, car part functions or car details you know absolutely nothing about, the chances of you actually retaining the information they are giving you is slim to none. You are likely standing their cold-faced, nodding in agreement to pretty much anything they say. The same can be said when a novice better is being given the rundown of the action available for wagering on any given day. They may understand bits and pieces but the amount of info they actually retain is limited.
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What is the Rundown?
If you hear someone talking about the “rundown” or telling you or someone else to give them the rundown, they are referring to all the lines that are available for a specific date, time and sport at any given sportsbook.
What Information is Included in the Rundown?
A rundown typically includes the teams involved, the game’s starting time, the current lines - money line and point spreads, and anything else that the person feels is relevant to the topic. When giving someone the rundown on a baseball card, the listed starting pitcher is a key piece of information you will want to give, as is perhaps the weather (should you think a specific game could be affected).
Typically, these rundowns don’t include prop bets or other exotic bets, though there is no reason a rundown or a very specific topic couldn’t.
There are a few ways a rundown could be delivered with the most obvious way being verbal between a group of people. Sometimes you will find game lists that have the essential info on it like date, time, sport and line. And if you are lucky enough to be in Las Vegas at a sportsbook, the rundown will be right in front of you on massive screens, or a live ticker, constantly updating lines and games.
How to Give Someone a Rundown
Because there is so much information to be delivered, the person giving the rundown should stick to a specific day – which during football season, could be a very, very busy Saturday and Sunday.
If you are running down a college football Saturday, or NFL Sunday, you should typically break the games down by time slot and then go from there. For example, “Saturday, 12:00p.m. slate, Wisconsin -7 at Northwestern, Purdue +14 at Michigan, and so on and so forth. You would typically do the same with the NFL, except in this case you would need to make a point of mentioning what the Sunday/Monday night games are.
If you are giving someone a rundown of a daily sport, like baseball or hockey, it is best if you stick to the same day card. Anything more than a single day would make the rundown confusing.
How to Handle the Rundown
The majority of seasoned bettors know how to take the rundown with a grain of salt and not get overly worked up when they hear a number or a matchup they might like. They know full well that there is still research to be done and that a matchup that sounds good, could be a terrible bet to invest their money in.
On the other hand, a novice better will act like a kid in a candy store. The information will be coming fast and furious and it will cause them to lose discipline and bet a bunch of games they haven’t even looked into yet. This is a gut reaction and many bettors just starting out are guilty of doing it. Once a novice bettor understands that the rundown is just a useful tool to save some time, they should be able to put the temptation of playing every game behind them and dig deeper into the games that hold the true value.
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