Sports Wagering: Don’t bet on your favorite Philadelphia teams

The proliferation and ease of placing legal bets has made it very tempting to put your hard-earned dollars down on the local clubs you know and love, but you really shouldn’t.

If you’ve watched more than two consecutive minutes of NBC Sports Philadelphia in recent months, you are well aware of the legality and widespread availability through various sites and apps to put down bets on sports.

What was once taboo and was basically restricted to “my buddy has a bookie down at the bar if you ever want to make a bet” is now perfectly legal in some places, including the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

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This means that a huge percentage of the Philadelphia sports fanbase now has it within their power to place wagers on their home teams.

To those Philly fans in the great state of Delaware, sorry, but you’re not completely in on the fun yet.

It’s quite a tempting idea to “double down” by betting on your Philadelphia Eagles or another of the local clubs, getting your requisite enjoyment out of a win while piggybacking on that with a monetary victory as well.

But, like many things in life, just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD do something.

For every time that you bet on the Eagles or the Philadelphia 76ers or any of your other favorite teams to win and cash in, you’ll like suffer an equal or greater number of instances where the team lets you down while also hurting your wallet in the process.

And what fan really wants that?

It’s hard enough to deal with losses in and of themselves, but a level of bitterness enters into the equation when your faith is not rewarded and said losses cost you money as well.

It’s a poisonous relationship for any fan to start tying financial gain to his or her favorite teams, and I say it’s a situation best avoided entirely.

But there is an alternative.

Instead of directly betting on one of your teams to win or cover or whatever other prop bet you can find, use each of their games as a chance to evaluate their opponent for strengths and weaknesses.

You’re already watching the entire Eagles or 76ers or Philadelphia Flyers game intently, so why not give yourself a crash course in the team they’re playing so you can gain a new level of understanding about them?

With this newfound expertise about another club, you can make more informed decisions when wagering for or against them in the near future when they’re not playing in a game against your favorite team. By removing any local bias from the equation, you allow yourself to think more clearly and make smarter decisions about where to put your money.

If you were watching local sports on Saturday, you saw the Flyers gut out a win over the Ottawa Senators while the 76ers blew the doors off the Cleveland Cavaliers. If you bet on either or both of them, congratulations on your win. But don’t expect it to always play out that way. If you made the same bets on Thursday, you’d have gone 0-for-2.

Instead, take what you learned about their opposition and utilize that info in those teams’ upcoming games.

In this way, the Philly faithful can still derive some kind of potential benefit from watching their team’s games, aside from the joy of fandom.

I do understand the mentality of “I’ve given these teams so much money that I deserve to make some back off of them”. But I feel that this indirect way of wagering on your favorite teams is the only way to go.

So watch, evaluate, and better prepare yourself to win on other games that don’t involve Philadelphia teams.

Because if you bet directly on the Philadelphia Phillies, Eagles, 76ers or Flyers, odds are that you’ll end up regretting it in more ways than one.