If you’re new to sports betting, a money line might seem like a foreign language at first. Actually, though, it’s a straightforward way of betting on a particular event and it doesn’t involve the handicapping of a point spread.
Point spreads are used to spread money evenly between the two teams, while a money line bet is only concerned with who wins.
For instance, say there was a hockey game between the Bruins and the Blackhawks. If you saw the money line, it might look something like:
Boston +110
Chicago: -120
If you’ve seen point spread odds, the minus and plus signs should already be familiar to you. The minus denotes the favorite and the plus the underdog. It’s the numeric portion that confuses some people. In this case, it signifies that in order to wager on Chicago, you must risk $120 to win 100. Accordingly, to wager on Boston, you’d risk $100 to win 110.Don’t worry; just because the money line is denoted in terms of $100, doesn’t mean you need to bet that much to participate. You can bet as much or as little as you wish and the same ratio will still hold.
So why is a money line used? Sports like hockey and baseball don’t typically have wide enough margins of victory to make a point spread practical, and sports like auto racing, horse racing, boxing and tennis are structured in such a way that a point spread is not possible. . This is another way for bookmakers to collect bets on both teams; only this time, he can’t realistically expect to get an equal amount of money on each, so he uses the money line to inflate the risk amount for the favorite to the point that if the underdog wins, he can use that money to pay the few gamblers who bet on it. However, if the favorite wins, he only needs a few underdogs to bet in order to pay off the winners, since they’re only winning $100 each. If a baseball team has very long odds of defeating their opponent, you might see something like:
New York Yankees -250
Pittsburgh Pirates: +200
As the Pirates get worse and the Yankees get better, the difference between those two numbers would continue to grow. In this scenario, if people wager $5,000 on the Yankees and the Pirates win, the bookie pays out $4,000 and keeps the rest. If the Yankees win, the bookie doles out $100 to each of the bettors who picked the favorite and doesn’t lose any money. This is assuming 20 people bet on each team, but in reality, it’s much more likely that many more people will bet on the favorite than the underdog, so the bookies profit would likely be higher. The only way he loses money is if, for some reason, the ratio of people betting on the favorite to those wagering on the underdog gets extremely low, but he’ll adjust the odds to prevent that from happening.
The money line can be used in any sport. It is just another method of betting the odds; albeit one that confuses many a new gambler.
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