No they don’t goddammit. Bookies don’t care who wins or loses or by how much. I am sick of supposed experts talking about point spreads as if they are predictions on the outcome of the game.
Lets make this clear. Oddmakers and bookies (both legal and illegal) care only about one thing. They want 50% of the bettors to bet on one team and 50% to bet on the other. They make their money off their 10% commision (vig) on winnings. The point spread is only there to even out the bets. If there were no point spread then every one would bet on the Pats.
I don’t expect everyone to know this. If you don’t bet or are not a big sports fan then you probably don’t know or care. But I hear this all day long on sports radio from supposed professionals. It annoys the piss out of me.
What is that, a strawman? Nobody in this thread has asserted that oddsmakers do think that.*
*Well, except you, in your thread title. You’re not Pitting yourself, are you?
What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t say that I am pitting any one on the Dope. Unless you happen to be a sports commentator on the radio. Is that you Maddog?
Nope. Hate professional sports, myself. I’m just funnin’ with ya, because you didn’t say who you were Pitting.
You don’t give a lot of openings for supporters to join you in your OP, though. Or for detractors to disagree, for that matter.
I can give you directions to the nearest mini-rant thread if you want. I think they’re still taking submissions.
I agree with the OP 100%. The lines out there are absolutely not predicitons of what the final margin will be, they are just the numbers which will get the most offsetting bets and maximize the guaranteed money to the house. In this case, 24 is merely the number at which the betting public will generally consider the game to be a coin flip.
A realated fallacy I hear a lot pertaining to gambling, is that everytime a line or over/under comes close to the final score, I’ll hear how smart the oddsmakers are, or how they are always right on. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a perfect example of confirmation bias . Anytime a line comes real close, people notice and assume the oddsmakers are geniuses. Anytime it ends up being way off, no one notices, or they assume its an abberation or exception.
Is the spread subject to change when the actual betting turns out to be way lopsided?
F’rinstance, let’s say that as of 6:00 p.m. Vegas Time tonight there have been $12M bets placed, of which $11M have gone on the Jets to beat the spread, and $1M on the Pats? I know bookies have to hate it when they’re put in a position of rooting for one side or the other (for their own best interest). If the oddsmakers were to drop the line to Patriots by 18, would there be any effect on bets already placed?
Or is there no switching of the point spread allowed?
Yes, lines are always moving. Here is a link to some lines, which includes what they opened at and where there are now. As you can see, the NE line has been coming down a bit, as well as the over/under on that game. The cause of both is almost certainly indirectly being caused by the weather report for that game, but directly it is because betters must have been taking the Jets and the under.
Of course, if you placed a legit bet in Vegas or online or whatver, you’ll have it at whatever the line was at when it was placed. Generally, if you’re betting through a bookie (i.e. illegally), they will have just one line, which will come out shortly before the game, and won’t change (except in maybe under some extreme circumstances).
isn’t this a chicken-and-egg problem, though? obviously people expect a grudge match before the spread is announced, and then the huge spread just reinforces the idea that it’ll be an ugly game.
From Trading Places
Randolph Duke
Good, William. Now, some of our clients are speculating that the price of gold will rise in the future. We have other clients who are speculating that the price of gold is going to fall. They’ve placed their orders with us and we buy or sell their gold for them.
Mortimer Duke
Tell him the good part.
Randolph
The good part is that no matter whether our clients make money, or lose money, Duke & Duke get the commissions.
Mortimer
Well, what do you think, Valentine?
Billy Ray Valentine
Sounds to me like you guys are a couple of bookies.
Randolph
I told you he’d understand.
So, consider it shorthand for “Oddmakers think that everyone thinks that the Pats will beat the Jets by 24.”
I think this is what Loach is forgetting in his rant. Point spreads ARE predictions of a sort.
Imagine you’re a bookie (let’s call you “Bob”) to a small group of betters (say 10 people) and have to set the spread on NE v Breakfast. Remember, Bob’s also the bank. Although Bob gets 10% of each bet, if everybody bets on the Pats and they chow down on steak and eggs, Bob has to cover all those bets and loses the steak he was going to have for dinner. Obviously, Bob wanted everybody to bet on eggs, but he can never count on that - it’s too risky. The point of the 10% is that Bob the bookie always hedges. This means he sets the line where 5 will bet one way and 5 the other and the bets are even, as has already been pointed out.
So Bob makes a prediction. He has to predict what the average (well, “mean” if we want to keep our statistical terms correct) prediction of the betters is going to be. If he always does it right, he always gets 10% and eats porterhouse every night. This is the key here, and the reason I don’t understand why the OP’s panties are in such a wad (Loach, I’m telling you, man - fabric softener).
Bob (let’s call him “Vegas Bob” now) IS making a prediction on the game when he sets the line. He’s just making that prediction based on what his little band of suckers,… er, betters think the results of the game is going to be. It may not be Vegas Bob’s exact prediction, but it IS the prevailing projection.
It’s like a poll, and as such can be pretty instructional. Now Loach, pull those panties out of your crack and stop being so damn semantic when people talk about spreads.
On preview, I see that Finagle has already made my point, but I think I’ll let this post roll.
Yes, but the difference is that Vegas Bob has many thousands of bettors rather than only ten so he can modify his prediction as the week goes on to make things even. Illegal Bookie Bob will trade action with other bookies. If Illegal Bookie Bob had too many NE bets and Illegal Bookie Fred has too many breakfast bets, they can hedge against each other. IOW, they are practically guaranteed porterhouse every week.
The bookies want the betting to be even, it lowers their risk. So he sets the odds to a point that just as many people bet on steak as they do on eggs. If seven people bet on steak and eggs wins, the bookie loses money. So they bookie is constantly adjusting the odds, so that the betting is even.
That said, take the under and Jets. It’s supposed to be snowy, wet, and windy.
It’s not true that the sportsbook is only interested in balanced action. That’s generally what they’re after, but it’s pretty much an established fact that odds-makers will sometimes pick a side by keeping the odds where they are in spite of (or even because of) unbalanced action when they feel confident that most of the money is coming in on the “wrong” side. They’re out to maximize their expected value, not necessarily minimize their variance, and sometimes that entails encouraging unbalanced wagering. Most games actually receive action that is unbalanced past the point at which the sportsbook is guaranteed a profit no matter the outcome.
Also note that bookies will only move the line a limited extent for fear of exposing themselves to middles.
As for the complaint in the OP, it’s somewhat inexact phrasing, but I think it’s still meaningful. Whether or not it’s a “prediction,” per se, the fact is that the Patriots, like every other team, have approximately a 50% chance of covering the spread on Sunday. So people are still giving out useful information about the expected result by saying “Oddsmakers predict that. . .”
Middles?
I’m not so much annoyed at “people” who talk about spreads. I have been listening to a lot of sports radio lately. This is talk from experts and sports journalists. People who should know better.
It’s basically moving the line and then having the result being between the first line and the last line (so both the early betters and the late betters win).
From here: Sports betting - Wikipedia
It’s not everyone, it’s half of everyone. Maybe they could say something like “bettors think 24 points is a midpoint for the Patriots’ margin of victory.” But then they’d be acknowledging that they are providing information to gamblers, and my experience is that ESPN doesn’t like to acknowledge that fact. When they admit that lines are for gambling, a host will usually make an aside about how their discussion is only for informational purposes.
The line is the most accurate predictor there is of who’s going to win. The line itself is not determined by Vegas bookies, it’s determined by the people who bet on the games. Vegas bookies just get good at predicting what it will be. The people betting on the games create a pretty efficient market that is a good indicator of who will win.
I imagine that ESPN doesn’t necessarily care about talking gambling, but the NFL cares a lot, so they avoid the topic in deference to the league. Al Michaels is famous for being (AFAIK) the only booth guy to allude to the point spread or Over/Under – I guess he’s famous enough to get away with it, but even he has to do it obliquely. If, for example, a team scores a meaningless touchdown in the closing seconds to change the result against the spread or the O/U, he’ll say something like: “… and that roar you just heard is coming from the floor of the MGM Grand.”
I like Al.