Betting hockey can be incredibly frustrating because it can be so unpredictable. Compared to other major sports, particularly football and baseball, hockey has so few major indicators that can give you the edge when choosing one team over another. When you bet baseball, you can be reasonably sure the better starting pitcher is going to come out on top. When you bet football, with the exception of some division rivalries, it’s normally fairly easy to identify the mismatches. But with hockey, what is there?

If you are going to try and analyze rosters to pick a winner, your best bet is to try and find games that see high scoring offenses playing against young or struggling goalies. However, even this is more of an art than a science, as quite often you’ll see some young no-name ‘tender come out and play absolutely stellar to shut down a powerhouse. The key then is to take advantage of this difficulty and put it to work for you by betting on some long shots.

When you bet hockey, there are a couple of ways to grab long shots and come out on top. One of the best ways is to simply look for teams that are on really poor streaks, particularly long losing streaks, and put your money down on them. More often than not, because the team is struggling, you’ll get fantastic odds. The key though is that in hockey, losing streaks don’t normally go on for very long. A six game losing streak for instance is catastrophic and you very rarely see teams approaching 10 games.

So if you can find a team or two that are pushing losing streaks into the 5 or 6 game duration, you might want to think about putting some money down on them, especially against better teams where the odds will be higher, and cashing in when they break that streak. Sometimes you can also get the extra edge of a team playing their backup against a struggling squad when it wasn’t expected, thus making the odds even juicier in your favour.