Following on from our look at how to bet on Australian Rules Football with PokerStars Sports a couple of weeks ago, we’re moving on to take a look at the different types of betting available in 
another market that is huge in the United States, Cuba and Japan, but which only enjoys muted acknowledgement in the UK. That sport is Baseball.
So if you have a PokerStars free bet hanging around in your account, or you’d just like to know a bit more about how to bet on this simple, yet often confusing sport, read on for more details about the most common types of bets and betting markets available.
Baseball Betting on PokerStars Sport – Futures
The most easily accessible forms of Baseball betting available all year round, especially during the off-season is betting on which teams in the United States of America Major League Baseball competition will be named the 2016 World Series Winner.
For those of you that don’t know the World Series is the equivalent of the NFL Season and Superbowl, where a host of teams from different conferences and divisions battle it out over the course of the season to qualify for the playoffs. The final two teams contest the World Series with the team winning that being declared the Champions.
The 2016 season will be the 112th time the World Series is contested and last year’s winners were the Kansas City Royals, who defeated the New York Mets 4 games to 1 in their best of seven clash.
PokerStars Sport has the Toronto Blue Jays as the 8/1 favourites to win the 2016 World Series, with Kansas City 17/2, New York Mets 10/1 alongside the LA Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs who are also 10/1 shots.
Other Common Types of Baseball Betting
The first thing to note is that like most sports, Baseball betting is very much a seasonal option with the vast majority of bets, such as those bets related to specific games, only available during the traditional Major League Baseball season, which tends to run from April through to the culmination of the World Series in October/November.
During these seven or eight months of action, there are a large number of baseball games played each day. Teams play around 162 games in their division over the course of the season and most days of the week sees plentiful baseball match action to bet on over the course of the campaign.
Typical bets that can be available for Baseball games when the season is running includes:
- Money Line bets – These are bets on which team will win the game, but to make betting more appealing some markets offered may offer the teams with a handicap (called Run Lines) to give odds around the even money mark, as well as straight odds.
- Over/Under bets – A good example of these bets are based on the number of home runs scored in a game, where punters can bet on there being over or under a stated amount depending on the game in question.
- Parlay Bets (Accas) – These are bets where a punter teams up a number of different result predictions into a single bet, with the odds on each bet accumulating. This is a similar type of bet to an accumulator, only Americans are more familiar with the term Parlay.
- Proposition Bets – These are bets which focus on individual statistics to do with a certain game, or even certain players within the game. Such as betting on a player to score a home run, or to bet on how many strikeouts a pitcher will have during a game.
One of the positives, certainly for UK punters not familiar with the nuances of Baseball (and in particular the prevalent use of statistics throughout the reporting of the game) is that you don’t need to understand Batting Averages or any other statistic other than the basic scoreline for most bets on Baseball.
So remember to check back to PokerStars Sport during the regular Baseball season and into the playoffs to see the wide range of bets available on the sport.
