China Sports Lottery – Gambling for Fun and (Occasional) Profit

China Sports Lottery – Gambling for Fun and (Occasional) Profit
Nov 11, 2010 By Bryce Roberts , eChinacities.com

If you live in China but haven’t seen Sports Lottery shops popping up around your city like dandelions over the last year, you must not be paying attention.  There are thousands of stores around the country, all operated by this state-owned sports gambling enterprise.  A visit to any location on the sports lottery network will present the viewer with a fairly hi-tech setup.  Generally a row of computers is found adjacent to the cashier’s desk, with flat screen TVs displaying sports highlights dotting the premises.  All bets are made at the cashier’s desk, but players can choose games and look at game lines and payouts on the computers (or in the comfort of their own home)at www.sporttery.cn.  This website contains the interface that betters will use when deciding which games to pick.  The Sports Lottery currently supports only NBA and football (soccer) games.  Since I don’t know Manchester United from NEC Nijmegen, I’m going to focus only on the NBA side of the Sports Lottery.  According to an employee at my neighborhood lottery center, horse betting will soon be available.  NBA bets are made in 2 RMB increments.  For my first trial, I went small and only made minimum bets for the sake of research!

Step 1: Learn the lingo

Betting on NBA games is available in four different ways at Sports Lottery locations.  While the methods of betting are simple enough (and will be explained shortly), a rudimentary basketball vocabulary in Chinese is required unless the employees at your nearest outlet speak English.  Never fear though, it’s literally as simple as being able to say seven words, in addition to the numbers 1-10.   You just need to be able to specify the visiting (ke as in ke ren for guest, sounds like “kuh”, falling tone) or home (zhu as in zhu ren for owner, sounds like “joo”, third tone) teams.  Team is dui, sounds like “dewey”, falling tone.  Win is sheng, sounds like “shung”, falling tone.  Lose is fu, sounds like “foo”, falling tone.  Da means big (but for betting, means over), and xiao means small (or under, pronounced she-ow).  So: ke fu means you bet the visiting team to lose.  Zhu sheng means you bet the home team to win.  Da is used for an over/under bet, you are taking the over, and xiao is under.  You only need to say numbers to reference the games themselves, or you can just point at the computer and the cashier can help take your bet.  The games will be in the same order as the are on Vegas line websites.  Still, it’s useful to be able to read a handful of characters, like lake for Lakers, net for Nets, wolf for Timberwolves (you get the picture).  Just be careful of the character for gold, it shows up in the names for Golden State Warriors as well as Denver Nuggets. 

Step 2: Understand the odds and risks

Now that the gambling Mandarin lesson is out of the way, I must point out a big difference between simple bets you would place with your bookie back home, and the ones at sporttery.cn:  China’s Lottery plays with the odds in an outright unfair way (sound like the stock market?), and, the Sports Lottery only rewards you if you pick several games at a time.  On the odds front, payouts for single bets are determined after the game is over, and all the bets are processed.  Even if you make a winning pick, your payout might be miniscule if enough other people also made it.  If you make just one correct pick in any game mode, you will simply earn your bet back and that’s about it (unless you pick a significant upset, as we’ll discuss later).  This means for all four betting modes you need to parlay your bets – or stack multiple bets - with a minimum of two games and a maximum of eight games.  This obviously decreases your odds of winning (as each additional bet adds more risk); but it’s the only way to play that will allow you to win a considerable return on your bet. 

Step 3: Make the bets (in 4 different ways)

Here are the four ways to bet with a quick refresher course to those of you who haven’t tried your luck with sports betting in awhile.  The first way is a simple pick; you choose which team will win a given match.  As stated earlier, you must pick upsets to get anything remotely close to a decent return.  I picked the Toronto Raptors to beat the Cleveland Cavaliers on October 29th.  I won (my only winning bet, as we’ll see later), and, as I proudly strode into the betting office a day later to collect my winnings, my joy was quickly taken away as the cashier informed me I had won a princely sum of four fen.  That’s right, my 2 RMB bet turned into 2.04 RMB, and since they don’t give out any change smaller than .1, I was simply given my wager back.  Had I picked several games together, I might have doubled or tripled my wager.

The second game type is familiar to Westerners: picking against the spread.  This game type is a bit rigged as well, as lines change based on whether a player parlays or just bets on a single game.  Another thing that is important to note is that China’s Sports Lottery betting sometimes uses lines that are different from Las Vegas’.  That Raptors/Cavaliers game was a pick ‘em in Vegas, but the Raptors were giving 2.5 points to the visiting Cavs on sporttery.cn .  This is important to note, as there might be opportunity to use discrepancies in the two lines to your advantage.  In my first try, I parlayed two bets together – Cavs to beat the -2.5 spread and New Orleans to beat the Nuggets (with the Hornets at home giving .5 points to Denver).  I got the Hornets pick right, but, as was shown earlier, didn’t get the Cavs call, so I got nothing.  I would have won 6.26 RMB from my 2 RMB bet had I called both games correctly.  Since you can do bets of tens of thousands of RMB, you can make some good money by picking 2 spread games correctly. 

The third type of game was new to me: picking the point differential between both teams’ scores at the end of a game.  I won’t explain this in depth as I imagine most seasoned betters will avoid this one for the more traditional types, but basically you need to both guess the correct winner, while also guessing a range of points that the score difference falls into.  Back to the Cavs/Raptors game: since Vegas had it as a pick ‘em, I thought it would be a close one.  I picked the Raptors to win, and then checked both the 1-5 box and the 6-10 box (with multiple boxes unchecked, going up to 25+).  As we know the Raptors won, but since they did so in 20-point-blowout fashion, I lost this bet as well (and yes, I know it was stupid to bet 3 times on one game, it was merely to observe).  Had the Raptors won by anywhere from 1 to 10 points, however, I would have won the bet.  However, since I did a single bet, the ticket doesn’t say how much my payout would be – it’s determined by how many people took what bet, and the odds change accordingly.  Think the whole thing’s rigged yet?  Yeah, me too.

The fourth and final betting method is a great way to get started if you want to try sports betting in China.  It’s a simple over/under pick on the total combined score from both teams at the end of the game.  You don’t pick who wins, you just pick if their combined score will be higher or lower than the number given for each game.  Again, if you just pick one game, you won’t win much, if anything.  If you parlay two to eight games together, however, you can win big.  This is where I need to explain the parlay system a bit: once you’ve determined how many games you will pick, you can also choose how the games are “combined” to determine your payout.  For example, for a 3-game parlay, you can do 3x1, 3x3, or 3x4.  3x1 just means if all three of your picks are correct, you win, if any one pick is wrong, you lose.  However, if you did 3x4, games A,B, and C are all compared in different combinations (A and B and C, A and B, B and C, A and C – 4 ways, hence 3x4).  If you get one game wrong, you’ll still win one of the combinations, and you’ll get about 2/3 of your bet back.  If you get all three games right, you get all four combinations right, and you win big.  The buy-in for 3x4 is higher than 3x1, but there’s the added “insurance” that you’re allowed to miss one game and still get something back. 

Totally confused yet?  It’s really quite simple to bet on NBA games in China, legally, and it makes watching the games all that much more fun!  Here is a recap and the main points to get you out the door and to your neighborhood China Sports Lottery location:

  1. Parlay your bets:  It’s risky, but it’s the only way to win money unless you want to pick single upsets, and that’s just as risky if not more so than parlaying solid bets.
  2. If you’re starting out, do simple picks or over/under.  Betting the spread is tough, as teams will take out their stars at the end of games when they’re up big, and allow opposing teams to close the gap.
  3. Check the Vegas lines, and see if the discrepancy with sporttery.cn is significant enough to give you an edge with your bets.
  4. Make sure you explain your picks carefully to the attendants at the betting station.  It’s easy to mix up home and away teams, and win/lose when speaking Mandarin.  Go over your bet a few times before you pay and have your ticket printed out.
  5. Start out small, then increase your bets if you feel you are on a hot streak.  The minimum bet for each game is 2 RMB per game, you can increase the multiple until you are betting stacks of cash.  Just don’t blame me for any losses!
  6. Have fun: betting at these state-sanctioned lottery spots gives you worse payouts than a typical bookie does, so don’t do it to make it rich.  Do it to make watching the games more exciting, and to be able to brag to people back home that you’re gambling in China!

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Keywords: sports betting China China sports lottery how to gamble China how to bet China gambling China

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