Players-Sb

When sports bettors look at the odds in the morning before making their sports picks, many of them are missing the whole story. Let's say they are capping bases and see that the Yanks are -190 favorites over the Devil Rays. "Too much juice," they whisper, and move on to the next game.

But is it? How do they know? Simply because it's a big number?

Money lines speak and they always say something very specific, but many gamblers simply hear: "Odds are pretty good the Yanks are gonna beat the D-Rays today, but they're too expensive to bet on at -190." Just how good are those odds and why on earth would they think the -190 is the price of the bet?

Odds are simply the chance of something happening, nothing more, and chances are expressed in percentages. What this money line is really saying is "The Yanks have a 65.5% chance of beating the Devil Rays today." It's not saying anything at all about the price or 'juice'.
To calculate the odds in the money line, you need two formulas, one for the favorite and one for the dog.

FAVORITE
FL/(FL + 100)

FL is the favorite line. Disregard the minus sign. So for the Yanks at -190 it goes like this:
190/(190 +100) = 190/290 = .655 or 65.5%

The Devil Rays are +170 dogs.

UNDERDOG
100/(DL + 100)

DL is the dog line. So:

100/(170 + 100) = 100/270 = .370 or 37%

Something doesn't seem right. If the books are saying the Yanks have a 65.5% chance of winning and the Devil Rays a 37% chance of winning, that's a 102.5% chance of one of these teams winning.

That's impossible. Nothing can be more than 100%. When a sweaty athlete in a post-game interview says he gave "110%", he's off by exactly 10%. The 2.5% is the price, the juice, the vig, the house edge, whatever you want to call it.

It's what we must overcome to make a profit in this business.

If we determine, as sports handicappers, that the odds on the Yanks are fair, then we must pass on this bet as there is no profit in it for us. If we make this bet a 1000 times, we would win 655 times and lose 345 times (1000 * 65.5% = 655). At -190 we would break even, nothing more. We would win 655 units and lose 655.5 units (the .5 can be explained by rounding). Betting on the D-Rays is an even worse idea. If the odds on the Yanks are fair, then the D-Rays are overvalued by the 2.5% (100% - 65.5% = 34.5%). They actually have only a 34.5% chance of winning the game, not 37% as claimed by the +170 money line. We would lose 68.5 units betting them over the course of a 1000 bets.

As sports handicappers, we must look for BETTER THAN FAIR odds. They're hard to find, but they're out there. Precision Plays wouldn't play the Yanks at -190 unless we determined they had at least a 70% chance of winning the game.

Very few situations, especially in baseball, have those good of odds.