What is Middling?

Have you ever seen a line open for a game and then rapidly and drastically swing the other way?  If so, you have already seen the perfect setup for a middling opportunity.  Middling is a very popular strategy, used by novice and experienced punters alike.  If you “middle” a game, you essentially are betting on one side, waiting for the betting line to move the other way, and then betting on the other side.

Ideally, you are hoping to win both of your bets, not just one or the other.  Say for example you are betting on the favourite at -5 points, and the underdog at +8 points.  If the favourite wins by more than 5 points but less than 8 points, you could actually win both of the bets.  If anything else happens, you are still in a good situation.  You might end up winning one bet with the other being a push, or both bets could end up being a push, in which case you will only lose the juice.

Middling may seem a counterintuitive strategy at first, because it may seem like each of your bets will cancel out the other.  This is not the case if you do it right, because you are betting against the line; remember, you can win a bet even on a losing team, and lose a bet on a winning team.  The idea here is to play the lines so well that you end up winning on both of the teams (and not neither).  To win both wagers, the outcome does have to be incredibly specific, so you do need to know what you are doing here to get the best results.  Experienced punters typically do best with this betting strategy for just that reason.

Middling is a particularly powerful strategy when you are wagering on NFL football games.  Key numbers (especially 3, 7 and 10) are very important in NFL betting, and once you familiarize yourself with them, you can pair up key numbers and middling to develop an effective method.  For example, you might find a game where you can wager on the favorite at -6.5 points and the underdog at +7.5 points.  That way you are honing in on a 7-point victory margin, which is an incredibly common one for NFL football games.  Games which do not have significant key numbers like this are a lot harder to middle on, because it is so much harder to predict the point differential in the final scores.

Learning how to middle isn’t easy, and if you are a beginner, you will need to take some time to really get a feel for handicapping before you can jump in and start making successful wagers using this strategy.  You would do well to do a substantial amount of research and testing with this method before you try it out live with real money.  If you can learn to excel at middling, however, you will have a very powerful strategy which you can use to profit time and again.