Sports betting

Where I'd start

Start with how to read betting odds and implied probability, because every other page here leans on those two. If you can turn -150 into 60 percent in your head, you are ahead of most of the people a book writes bets for. I'd learn it before anything else.

Then the straight bets: spreads, moneylines and totals. One game, one opinion, one price.

Everything built on top

The rest are built on top of those. Parlays, teasers, round robins, same game parlays, props, futures and live betting each get a page, and so do hedging and the sport-by-sport guides.

One thing holds across all of them, and I never saw it fail from behind the counter: the further a bet gets from a plain straight bet, the more the book makes on it. I'd learn the plain ones first and treat the others as entertainment until the arithmetic says otherwise.

Read bankroll before you bet any of it. Knowing the bets is half the job, and the other half, deciding what you can afford to lose, is the half most people skip.