How Do Odds Work In Betting? Understanding How Football Matches Are Priced Up
Just like in all the betting odds explained in this guide, the higher your risk, the higher your potential payout. Use parlays to string together several bets and, with a little luck, you could be in for a big payday. American betting odds display with a plus or minus sign followed by a number. Negative numbers indicate the favorite, while positive numbers indicate the underdog.
Winning a bet isn’t simply a case of successfully picking the right team, person, or league with luck. You need to take into consideration the sports betting odds that are laid out for you before you start wagering. As you can see, understanding the -110 in sports betting is pretty basic once you realize what it represents. You can also apply this knowledge to other odds as well, such as the money line. This kind of bet is different because you are betting who will win the game straight-up, which causes the odds to be different for each game (instead of -110 for everything).
Odds of 3-1 indicate that if you bet $100, you will win $400, the original amount of your bet plus the profit. On the flip side, the plus-minus juice can also encourage gamblers to wager on a longshot. If the Los Angeles Lakers are a +500 to win the NBA championship, a successful $100 bet would net $500.
Want to buy odds on the color of the Gatorade dumped on the head coach as time runs out at the Super Bowl? We call that a prop bet, and Super Bowl betting is notably famous for offering up the most prop bets for any single sporting event. That is, oddsmakers aren’t leaning heavily one way or the other as to who is more likely to win this game.
This is different from spread betting, which uses a handicap to theoretically level the odds on both sides. All the bettor’s selection must do is win and the moneyline wager pays out. Prop bets generally refer to anything that is not directly tied to the outcome of the game. They can be over / under bets on how many times a player or announcer does something, or they can be bets on which team will do better in general on a certain topic. For example, in a football game, the oddsmakers may set the odds for which team will get more running yards. In this kind of bet, the odds are set at the beginning of the season, but they can go up or down as time goes on.
Our basic assumption here is that Carolina was lined as the one-point favorite due to being the home team in this event. Now you know how to work out the probability of an event happening, you can use the betting odds to work out the potential returns if you were to bet on it. A push happens when a team wins or loses by the exact number of points as the spread states. This means that you don’t win or lose anything, you just get your money back. Note that even though spreads use the same symbols as American odds, spreads and odds are two distinct things, and it is important to make that distinction.