When you’re betting on the NFL, like thousands of us do every single week of the season, you need to make sure you pay really close attention to the line movements. If you spend time analyzing the line movements on each of the games that week you can usually find some good value in a couple of the games. Handicappers that don’t spend the time to watch the line movement in the NFL often don’t end up with the best value for their money.

At the beginning of each week during the NFL season you’ll see most online sportbooks posting their point spreads for the week’s games. During the first few hours that the line is posted it will see significant movement in most cases for several reasons. One of the big reasons is because a lot of the sharps or betting syndicates will feel that one or multiple lines are not where they should be, thus making their bets early. Since this group of people bets a large amount of money it will cause the line to make a sharp move in the point spread.

For instance, if the line opens up at –6 in a game and the sharps had the spread at –7 or more then they’ll jump on the –6 the second that they possibly can because they know that the public will eventually hammer the –6 if they notice it. Once the sharps bet the –6 the books are forced to increase the spread and generally in these situations it could move from anywhere to –7 – -9. At this point the early line movement would be done on this game and it wouldn’t move much anymore until the public decides what side they’re going to be on for the game.

If the public continues to bet on the favourite throughout the week the pokerstar.net spread will slowly continue to increase, often by a -.5 point or maximum a full point. If you want to be on the favourite in the game then you should do it as early in the week as possible so that you don’t end up with a –10 point spread when the game initially opened up at –6. You could risk waiting on the game and hope that the spread goes down right before kick-off, but this might result in not being able to bet the game. The only way the spread would go down in the scenario above is if the sharps decided to middle the game before kick-off and take the +9/+10.

With the sharp know hammering the underdog you can expect the spread to go back down by a point or two before kick-off. This would be a good time to jump on the favourite if you missed making the poker bet earlier in the week because the spread should be back down to about –7/-8. There are a lot of reasons why the lines move throughout the week in NFL ranging from where the money is being bet to injuries. Sometimes you might not hear about an injury until late in the week and if it’s one of the team’s best players then you can expect to see the line adjusted.