How To Understand Betting Lines

How to Read Betting Lines

Lines

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If your sports betting experience consists mostly of office pools during March Madness or a casual wager between you and a friend while you watch the Super Bowl, the transition to serious sports betting means learning how to read betting lines. The biggest difference between making the kind of casual bets mentioned above and placing wagers with online sportsbooks or at brick-and-mortar bookshops is the use of sports betting lines. Casual wagers usually involve each person in the bet picking one team to win, then wagering an equal amount, say $20 or $30. Professional bookmakers, online sports betting exchanges, and sports betting facilities in casinos have a more complex system for offering wagers on sporting events, in part to ensure profit on the part of the book, and in part to present a standardized representation of odds.

Understand

Let’s start with the basics: what do sports bettors mean when they talk about a ‘line?’ The word line, in the language of a sportsbook, can refer to either the odds and/or a point spread in any sports contest. Let’s take a look at an imaginary line the way you’d read it off the board sitting in a Vegas sports betting lounge or on the screen at your online book. Let’s imagine a game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys. Your book’s NFL betting line might look something like this:

How To Understand Baseball Betting Lines

DAL -7.5-110 -405
NYG +7.5-110 +300
56.5 ov-110

What may look like a jumble of words, numbers, and punctuation is actually a precise and easy-to-read breakdown of the various odds and point spread details your book is offering. Here is a breakdown of each unit of information given above. Once you understand each part of the jumbled details above, you’ll be able to read a sports betting line with confidence.

The Point Spread

Obviously, the first three letters on the top two lines of the three-line package of symbols represents a team in the game you’re wagering on; NYG stands for the New York Giants, while DAL stands for the Dallas Cowboys. The number next to each team’s name is known as the spread or the point spread. Wagers on the point spread are among the most popular sports wagers in the world. The reason this wager is popular is that it doesn’t matter which team wins or loses; what matters is the amount of points the teams score, and whether or not the team you place your money on beats the difference in points (the ‘spread’) or not.

Placing a point spread bet means gambling on how much a team will win or lose by. In our above example, the Cowboys are the favorite. How do we know that? The minus symbol in front of the point spread indicates that the bookmaker thinks the final score will have Dallas winning by 7.5 points or more. The underdog, in our example that’s the New York Giants, will always be indicated with a plus sign. If you wager on the Cowboys on the point spread, America’s Team will have to win by at least 8 points for your wager to pay off. Should the Cowboys win by less than 8 points, your bet is lost.

A wager on the Giants on the spread does not mean that New York has to win the game in order for you to win cash. All the G-Men have to do is come within 8 points of the ‘boys, and you’re a winner. You determine a winning or losing point spread by adding or subtracting 7.5 from the final score, depending on which side you laid your bet. If you’re confident that New York will at least come within a touchdown of beating the Cowboys, or beating them outright, then you’d wager on the spread in favor of New York.

A quick word on that annoying half point in the point spread – most lines you’ll come across will use half points, but it’s not standard practice across the board. When you see a line with a full number instead of a number with a half point, your wager could end up as a push. In our example, if the line were 7 instead of 7.5 and the final difference in points was exactly 7, your wager is returned to you, and neither you nor the book makes money.

What’s the function of the second number in the line?

The second number in our example (-110 for both teams) tells you how much you have to wager in order to win $100. It’s an easy way to calculate how much you’ll win if your bet pays off, presented in units of $100 at a time for simplicity’s sake. Most of the time, these two numbers will be the same, because oddsmakers want to set lines so that they get as much action on the underdog as on the favorite, guaranteeing them a profit. If a book gets a single bet of $110 (by a customer hoping to win $100) on the Cowboys and a single bet of $110 on the Giants, it will have taken in $220, but will only have to pay back $210 to whichever customer wins the bet. That’s a guaranteed profit of $10, and since sportsbooks take far more than a single bet in either direction, they stand to earn that seemingly small amount of profit many times over. The $10 difference between what you wager and what you win is known as juice or vig in the sports betting industry, and it’s the way books earn their bread and butter.

What does the last number in the line mean?

The last number in the top two rows of our sports line example is known as the money line. If you’re not interested in betting on the point spread, you can wager on a team to win outright. The plus sign next to the underdog (in our case, the Giants) indicates how much money you’ll earn for every $100 you bet on the money line. Conversely, the minus sign next to the favorite’s line tells you how much you have to wager in order to win $100. In our example, a $100 wager on the Giants earns you $300 should they pull off the upset, while a bet of $405 on the Cowboys will net you an extra $100. Representing odds in units of $100 makes placing different size bets easy; if you want to bet $10 on the Giants, you stand to earn $30 if they win, while a $40.50 bet on the Cowboys will net you an additional $10.

What does the bottom row of numbers and letters mean?

How To Understand Betting Lines For Beginners

The final line of information in our example line is the over-under. Wagers placed on the over-under have nothing to do with which team wins or the difference between the points they score, but rather the combined number of points both teams will score in the game.
The first number (56.5 in our sample line) is the book’s predicted total score, while the second number (110 in our Giants/Cowboys rivalry game) is how much a punter has to bet in order to win $100. If you were to bet the over-under on this game, you’ll have to decide whether you think the combined score of both teams will be higher or lower than the number put up by the book. Let’s say you bet the over, assuming the game will be a shootout between two talented offenses, you’re hoping that the final score will be anything that totals 57 or more. It could be Dallas 54, New York 3, or any other point combination that adds up to 57 or more and your bet will win. Betting the under means that the two teams cannot score more than 56 points combined, or else you lose your bet.

Reading sports betting lines becomes easier with practice and experience with different sporting events. What looks like a jumble of letters and numbers actually gives a lot of information in a tiny amount of space. Different sports have different types of wagers available, such as the run line in baseball or the puck line in hockey, both of which replace the money line found in our football example. The more experience you have watching and gambling on different sports, the faster you’ll be able to read betting lines.

Below is an automatically updating feed that lists the current odds for professional golf. If you like to bet on PGA golf, bookmark this page for quick access to the latest golf betting lines. If you are looking to bet on golf, we recommend Sports Interaction, non-USA bettors only. 18+, T&Cs apply, and Gamble Responsibly (BeGambleAware).

How to Read the Lines

How To Understand Betting Lines On Football

Golf betting lines can be read in American odds, decimal odds, or fractional odds – whichever you choose. Most sportsbooks offer a button where you can change the odds into your preferred format.

American golf lines are read as negative (-) or positive (+). A negative golf line indicates a favorite, but isn’t usually seen until the third or fourth day of a tournament when one or two players take a significant lead. Before a golf tournament starts, every player will be given a positive line. Negative and positive golf lines are based around the $100 figure, but payouts are calculated differently.

A negative golf line will be listed something like this:

  • Tiger Woods: -140

This means that Tiger Woods is the favorite, and that it takes a bet of $140 to win $100 more, for a total return of $240.

How To Understand Betting Lines Meaning

A positive line will look something like this:

  • Phil Mickelson: +210

In this case, a bet of $100 would pay out a $210 profit, for a total return of $310. A positive golf line can be a favorite or an underdog, depending on how the other players lines are set. If Phil Mickelson at +210 are the lowest odds of any of the players, then he is still considered the favorite. This happens in the earlier rounds of a golf tournament when no players have taken a big lead.

So, to wrap this up, a negative money line indicates the amount of money needed to wager to win $100 in profit, and a positive money line indicates the amount of profit that can be won from a $100 wager.

Types of Golf Betting Lines

Wagering on golf is interesting because not only can you bet on winners of future golf events, but also after each day of a tournament. Based on how players finish each day changes the odds, giving you multiple opportunities to pick the winner. While the odds for players at the top of the leader-board go down as a tournament progresses, you can get a feel for how players are doing throughout the weekend. If a player is rising throughout the weekend, but is still 2 or 3 shots off the lead going into Sunday, you’ll get decent odds on him while he’s hot. If the top player is not a great closer, this could be a smart time to bet.

Futures Lines

Different types of futures bets can be made for PGA, LPGA, and EPGA golf. You can bet on how many majors Tiger Woods will win, or if any of the other top players will win a major as well. Most sportsbooks offer these types of futures bets on Padraig Harrington, Rory Mcilroy, Steve Stricker, Lee Westwood, Paul Casey, Geoff Ogilvy, Phil Mickelson, Anthony Kim, Jim Furyk, Jeff Overton and more.

How To Understand Betting Lines Online

Futures bets can also be made on the Ryder Cup, the Open Championship, the Masters, the US Open Championship, the PGA Championship and many other tournaments throughout the season.