Understanding Asian Handicaps
In this guide I’m going to explain what Asian handicaps are - you only need to have a basic understanding of them to use the Steam Chaser.
Alright, let’s break down Asian Handicaps in a really simple way.
An Asian Handicap is just another way to bet on a football match, similar to the regular 1x2 market where you bet on a team to win. But there are a couple of differences:
The first difference is the handicap itself. In an Asian Handicap, one team is given an advantage, or the other team is given a disadvantage before the match even starts. This adjustment levels the playing field between two teams of different strengths.
Let’s say there’s a match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. If you bet on Forest with a +1 handicap, it means that before the game even begins, Forest is given a virtual 1 goal advantage. So, if the match ends in a 1-1 draw, your bet still wins because, with the +1 goal adjustment, it’s like Forest won 2-1.
On the other hand, if you bet on Liverpool with a -1 handicap, they start the game on -1 goals. So, for this bet to win, Liverpool needs to win the game by more than 1 goal. Imagine they finish 1-0. With their -1 handicap applied, they finished 0-0. So it’s a draw. This leads us to the second big difference with Asian Handicaps—which is that if the adjusted score is a draw, you get your stake refunded.
So, with the above example again, you bet on Liverpool -1. The match finishes 1-0 to Liverpool, your -1 handicap is applied, so the adjusted score is 0-0. That’s a draw, and you get a refund.
The handicaps can also be half numbers, like +0.5 or -1.5. This works the same way but makes it impossible to end in a draw and get a refund. Let’s say you bet on Liverpool -1.5, and the match finishes 1-0 to Liverpool. With the -1.5 handicap, Liverpool’s adjusted score is now -0.5, meaning Forest wins by half a goal. In this case, you lose the bet because the handicap didn’t bring the adjusted score to a draw, it swung the win to the other team.
Lastly, there’s something called a quarter-goal handicap, like +1.25 or -0.75. This might sound confusing, but it’s like splitting your bet into two separate bets. Let’s say you bet on Nottingham Forest with a +1.25 handicap. You’re putting half of your money on +1 and the other half on +1.5. Now, if that sounds confusing, don’t worry because you don’t really need to understand the mechanics of it; you need to know that it's a type of bet, and the software might recommend you place them sometimes. Some bookies will represent these quarter bets as an actual split - so instead of 0.75 they might show 0.5/1. That's half on +0.5, and half on +1, so the exact same thing, it’s just another way of representing it.
Handicaps are usually grouped on bookies, so when one team has a +0.5 handicap, the opposite team will usually be in the same market with -0.5. And that can be confusing. For example, in this example, my bet is Man Utd -0.5, but the market is named +0.5 because that's how they’ve decided to categorise the bet alongside the Southampton one. So my bet is on -0.5, even though the market name is 0.5.
Couple more things to watch out for:
Some bookies have separate Asian Handicap markets for full time vs half time.
This market says 90 minutes, so that’s for the full time match.
This one is just for the first half. If the Steam Chaser tells you to bet on the full-time, you want the 90-minute one, not the first-half one. Yes, I made that mistake.
Lastly, you cannot bet on the draw on an Asian Handicap. If you look at three selections, like this one, it is not an Asian handicap, but a European handicap. European Handicaps are just like Asian Handicaps, but if your bet ends in a draw, you don’t get your money back; you lose - unless your bet was on the draw itself. The Steam Chaser lets you toggle between European Handicaps, but I would avoid these until you’re really confident about the different types.
