How To Read And Calculate Sports Odds
For example, which odds give the best return – 16/5 or 3/1? You can work it out, but a glance at their decimal equivalents (4.2 and 4.0 respectively) quickly tells you which odds are most favourable. This is why we recommend that all beginners start betting using decimal odds. As the web has become more popular as a place to bet, European decimal odds have become more commonplace. Moneyline, or American, odds are favoured by US bookmakers and punters, and are often expressed as positive and negative values (e.g. +250, -400). Odds are the numbers used by online bookmakers to show how likely something is to happen.
Calculating your implied probability is a valuable tool to determine if a wager is worth the risk. All you have to do is multiply the amount of money you’re wagering with the odds attached to the team you’re betting on. The odds are what suggest a particular outcome in any match, and the implied probability refers to the prospect of that outcome. Using the +260 odds on the Packers, a $10 bet would payout $26 in profits, plus the return of your original $10 bet for a total of $36 back in your pocket.
Green Bay is +3.5, meaning they are 3.5-point underdogs. In all areas of sports wagering, a plus-sign always indicates an underdog, with a minus sign indicating the favorite. If you bet on Green Bay at +3.5, a bet on them will win if they either win the game outright or if they lose by a number not exceeding 3.5. For a bet to win on Detroit, they would need to win the game by 4 points.
They represent how much a bet on each team pays out and they also show you which team is favored to win and how heavily they’re favored. Vigorish Explained – There is a misconception in sports betting that one only has to hit 50% of their bets to break even. Loot explains how vig works, which makes the actual break-even point 52.38%. In the above example, Pittsburgh is a small favorite at -135. What that means is that for every $100 you want to win on the Penguins, you must bet $135.
Because you should only bet when you believe the probability of an outcome occurring is higher than the implied probability. But if you would like to learn more about betting odds and alternative odds formats, try this odds converter. They show an outcome equivalent to the decimal value of the fractional odds plus one. When something is just as likely to happen as not, it is given even odds. These are presented as 1/1 in fractional odds or 2.0 in decimal odds.
In the realm of sports, very rarely are two opponents evenly matched. Because of this, legal sports betting sites handicap each team via the point spread. Using the above Notre Dame vs. Miami betting line, the point spread favors ND to win by 7.5 points (-7.5). To make betting on sports and other occurrences more competitive and interesting, odds are included that handicap the games so that wagers fall evenly on both outcomes. Since sportsbooks offer different odds for the same competitions, our guide to shopping betting odds breaks down how to find the most lucrative odds.
