It seems that every sports program, app, or website has information about the betting line for a particular contest. I’m not really interested in learning to gamble, but I’d like to understand what they’re talking about. Is there a website or app that discusses this sort of thing? Or, can some Dopers enlighten me?
For example, my ESPN app tells me that the Detroit Lions are visiting Baltimore to play the Ravens tonight (Sept 22, 2025). Below that, it says “Spread: BAL -4.5 Total 53.5 ML DET +180” What does all that mean? Suppose I hope that the Detroit Lions win tonight. I bet (somewhere) $100 on the Lions to win. The game ends tonight with a score of DET 21 - BAL 14. How much do I win? What if the game ends in a tie? What if the score differential is closer than seven points? Do I lose no matter what if the Ravens end up winning the game?
I think you’re combining several bets with your formatting. The “ML Det+180” bit means if you bet $10 on Detroit you’ll get $28 back including your original stake. Ties would be void, you’d just get your money back.
Presumably they offer some fixed price you haven’t specified for betting whether Baltimore will win by 5 or more points or betting if the game will have 54 or more points total. Since you can bet both sides of the line that price will be less than even money. In American format that will be listed with a minus sign, and will be the amount of winnings they give you for every $100 you risk, i.e -95 would mean you’d get $195 back including your stake.
If you ever do start gambling there will probably be an option to change the odds format to decimal/European. This is so much simpler, it’s just a straight multiple of your stake.
Here are a couple of websites that you can peruse. There are a ton of different bets one can make on a sporting event. I would suggest start by learning the basics (money line, point spread, over/under, and, most importantly, the odds), before you try to figure out parlays and prop bets.
And do feel free to ask questions here. There a lot of Dopers who may occasionally place a small wager on the outcome of a game or two that may be able to help you understand things that are unclear about sports betting.
Those are three different bets that can be placed on the same game. BAL -4.5 means that someone betting on Baltimore wins if Baltimore “covers the spread” by winning by 5 or more. It isn’t listed, but bets on the spread, whether for the favorite or the underdog, are implied to be at -110, meaning that you have to bet 110 dollars to win 100 (a $110 dollar bet gets you $210 total, your original $110 plus the payout of $100).
The total of 53.5, AKA the over / under, is also implied to be a -110 bet, only in this case it’s about whether you think the total score will be 53 or less, or 54 or more. Payouts work the same way as they do by betting the spread. Occasionally, if there is more money on one side than the other, the sports book will change the odds slightly, usually to -105 to the side getting less money bet on it and -115 to the side getting more money bet on it. That means for the -105 you only have to bet $105 to win $100 rather than the usual $110. That extra $5, $10, or $15 is how the casino makes their money. Since bettors on both sides have to pay that extra money, the casino uses the money from the losing bettors to pay the winners and keeps that extra money as their cut. Assuming that they set the line correctly (which for the casino means getting about an equal amount of money bet on both sides), they will always come out ahead due to that extra money.
The last one, the money line bet, is a straight bet on one team or the other to win. For that one, there should be another number listed, something like BAL -200 (or maybe -210 or even -220), for people who want to bet on the Ravens to win without worrying about covering the spread. The -200, similar to the above, means you have to bet $200 to win $100, that is a $200 dollar bet would return $300 total.
Typically numbers less than 100 won’t be listed that way. Instead an underdog will have +105 rather than -95, meaning that if you bet $100 you get back $205 total if you win.
Ooh! Fun subject, provided I’m not putting my own cash on the line. A few extra details:
For a long time newspapers would run point spreads for NFL games and some college football games, but nothing else. In the old days there were sports books that took money line (or straight line, as it was called then) bets, but these all but disappeared when I was a child, possibly earlier. The problem was that while big upsets were POSSIBLE, they didn’t happen nearly enough for the books to avoid taking a beating on them. Keep in mind, too, that this was a time where powerhouses would routinely schedule multiple pathetic no hope cannon fodder sacrificial lambs (I’ve seen spreads going into the 60’s), so there were numerous instances were having a straight line at all was pure idiocy. Oh, and for some tales of abject misery on this board, four words: “only bet straight line” (and invariably took the side of those cupcakes).
In any case, the odds do not reflect the relative strength of the teams, but how much confidence the oddsmaker thinks the bettors have on those teams. That’s why you’ll see big spreads in college but NFL rarely goes above 14 or so. It’s not that blowouts don’t happen in the NFL, it’s that they’re much harder to predict.
There’s a lot of versatility in these bets, too. Over/under can be anything with a number: yards gained, 3-pointers made, time of possession, assists, what have you. Money line can encompass any number of teams or athletes; I see it all the time in the scrolling tickers on FS1, everything from MVP races to odds of winning the World Series. (I’d consider anything above +5000 a sucker bet, but you do you. )
They’re all sucker bets because the house edge is usually 4.5 percent, which is gigantic. That’s bigger than the house edge in 6:5 blackjack.
No ordinary schmuck is defeating that house edge, no matter how much they think they know about college hoops or whatever. The hordes of nerds with lots of computing power employed by the bookie sites WILL make money off you.
That, by the way, is why they want to to bet on parlays. For the OP, a parlay is a bet whereby you bet on more than one thing, and win the bet only if ALL those things happen. So instead of betting on, say, four NFL games as individual risk/rewards, I bet I will be correct on ALL FOUR - a far less likely scenario, of course, but the attraction is that if I win, the odds on all four bets are multiplied to determine what I win. The catch is that that house edge is baked into each individual event’s odds, so it very slightly compounds. On a 5-leg parlay, the house edge isn’t 4.5 percent. It’s worse - it’s about 20%, which is a HORRIFIC gambling game, worse than slot machines and worse than any table game. Only Keno and the actual lottery are worse.
Thank you, y’all, for the informative conversation. I’m getting a much better idea of what everyone is talking about.
I’m not sure I understand what the “house edge” in this context means. I certainly understand that the house is always going to make money on all of the bets. Is this edge their profit margin on the transaction? If so, where is their cut taken out?
If you bet $100 on the Blue Jays to cover the spread, you don’t win $100. You win less than $100, usually $90. (For some math reason I am too tired to explain, the edge isn’t 10%.)
”House edge” means the expected amount you will win as a percentage compared to what you bet. In standard blackjack, assuming you play correctly, the house edge is small, about one percent; you win back approximately 99 cents for every dollar you wager. In two-zero roulette, you win 94.6 cents back per dollar. In Mississippi Stud you win 95.1 cents per dollar. Those are normal house edges at table games. Slot machines have small house edges.
For obvious reasons a casino cannot make a game with a ridiculous house edge - most of the time - because you won’t play. Blackjack wouldn’t be fun if the dealer always destroyed you in five minutes; the players have to have winning streaks and profitable days or they won’t come back.
The evil genius of sports betting parlays is twofold:
The one way to get people to accept a huge house edge is the lottery mentality; if you offer ridiculously hug wins, where buddy can bet $25 and win $2500, he won’t notice the edge that much. It’s hard to realize a fair bet, with a reasonable edge of 2-5 percent, would mean you win $3000, not $2500. But when the potential win is ginormous, it just mentally seems like “lots of money.” It’s why people play the lottery. At blackjack, where you just win back the amount you bet, you’d notice very quickly if the game was really tilted against you.
They have successfully convinced people - men, mostly young men - that betting at Bet365, MGM, etc is a skill. They are appealing to the sports fandom in these young men. Hey, I know sports! I’ll pay attention and win because I know football! It’s an illusion. Take it from me; if you meet a person who says they can make a living at this, assume they’re delusional.
You can bet on the toss, typically pays $1.90. So if there’s one bet for heads and one for tails, bettors pay in $2, agency pays out $1.90 and keeps 10c regardless of the result.
Which is why all the side bets on table games (or center bets on craps) these days. For blackjack, as an example, I don’t mean so much the slight variants you probably won’t find at most casinos but really terrible side bets. I remember one that was about getting dealt a total of twenty in your first two cards that had a house edge of something like 15%.
I remember a quote from a young gambler in a long ago Sports Illustrated series about rampant illegal sports gambling on college campuses: “All my bookies drive nice cars.”
The casino in Brantford had side bets at the POKER tables, I shit you not; it was called “Lucky Lucky,” and amounted to bets on card combinations on the flop. Like, if it added up to 21, you got three to one, if it was a 3-card straight, you got something else, I don’t remember all the payouts. I think they had it at Great Blue Heron, too.
Real poker players hated it because it slowed the game down, as the dealer was now obliged to handle it prior to continuing on with the hand, and also it was an insane thing to play.
Quoting for emphasis. Additionally, if you ever meet someone who claims they’re good at this, ask them how many sports betting apps have throttled their betting limits.
There ARE people who are really good at sports betting - but they’re vanishingly rare, and have to balance their bets across multiple accounts and platforms to avoid getting kicked off the apps.
Last time I wandered through a casino, I saw a Blackjack table with side bets. You could bet on your two cards plus the dealer’s up card to make a straight, flush, 3 of a kind, etc. Or you could bet on your two cards making a pair, or a pair of the same color. I think there were others, but I lost interest and walked on.
You’d think so but not necessarily. It is very common for a person who is quite skilled at poker to be a degenerate who loses their money at other gambling games.
A few extra details:
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