Common wisdom says that a point spread is simply a handicap entered by a bookmaker that speaks to how much better one team is than their opponent. In fact, this is not actually the case. Even professional sports bettors sometimes bet on point spreads without taking into account their true origin and purpose.
The rationale behind a point spread was to give bettors an incentive to place a wager on a team that had significantly less of a chance of beating a much better opponent. Without this incentive, the favorite would receive the vast majority of bets, and sportsbooks would quickly go broke if the favorite ended up winning the game. Something had to be done to offset this potential calamity, which is where point spreads came in. When a bookmaker determines a point spread, however, he isn’t only thinking about the difference between the two teams.
A bookmaker’s goal is for bettors to put an equal amount of money on both teams in a given sporting event. That way, he stands to make at least some profit on each event, since bettors must risk $11 to make $10. That is what the bookmaker is trying to accomplish when creating a spread and that is what motivates him to use spreads that might surprise you when you are looking at the odds for a particular game.
The challenge behind creating a successful spread, (from a bookmaker’s perspective,) is to come up with a spread that encourages people who want to play it safe to bet a decent amount of money on the favorite, while more seasoned gamblers wager large bets on the underdog. The bookmaker’s ultimate scenario is for many people to bet smaller amounts on the favorite and fewer gamblers to wager higher amounts on the underdog so the two sides balance out, and the sportsbook makes a profit without any risk to itself. In practice, however, this doesn’t happen very frequently. However, this does help explain a common thread throughout football point spread betting.
Why do all sportsbooks advertise virtually the same spreads on each game? At most, you may see a half-point difference between some of them. The answer is that deviating from the pack in either direction would deluge the sportsbook with a flood of bets for one team or the other. If the general consensus for the spread on a game was 7, and one sportsbook reduced its spread to 6, most gamblers worth their salt would be betting with that sportsbook. Obviously, this would be great for that sportsbook if the team still didn’t make the spread but potentially bankrupting if they did. No sportsbook wants to expose itself to that kind of risk if it can help it.
The moral here is that when you next see a point spread and you automatically start thinking, “ok, they think team A is this much better than Team B,” catch yourself and remember that this isn’t exactly the case. This is part of the calculus, certainly, but in the end, all the sportsbook wants is equal money on both teams, and it will set the spread accordingly.
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