Hedge betting — a strategy for those who already lucked out

Just after the Golden State Warriors won the championship in 2015, the gambling website TheGreek.com listed the team at +650 to win the 2016 NBA title.

[...] when the Warriors made the 2016 Finals, those who had put significant money on the team faced an interesting choice: to hedge or not to hedge.

Once the Warriors made the NBA Finals, John could have bet on the other team.

After the Splash Brothers and company racked up 73 wins during the regular season and made it to the Finals, those odds of them repeating as champs were much higher, offering about one-tenth or less of the payout compared with the preseason odds on most gambling sites.

At the beginning of the 2014 MLB season, the Kansas City Royals were 25/1 to win the World Series, so anyone betting on that team at the start of the World Series would have been wise to partially offset that with a wager on the San Francisco Giants.

GamblingSites suggests hedge betting is “extremely useful in the right circumstances,” but it cautions to not overuse the strategy.