Michael Ross If your sports betting experience consists mainly of office pools during March Madness or a casual wager between you and a friend watching the Super Bowl, the transition to severe sports betting means learning to read betting lines. The most significant difference between making the kind of casual bets mentioned above and placing wagers with online crypto sportsbooks or at brick-and-mortar bookshops is the use of sports betting lines.
Simple 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 to ensure a profit on the part of the book and, in part, to present a standardized representation of odds.
Start with the basics
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 or a point spread in any sports contest. Let’s 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:
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 a precise and easy-to-read breakdown of the various odds and point spread details your book offers. Here is a breakdown of each unit of information given above. Once you understand each part of the messy details above, you’ll be able to read the sports betting line with confidence.
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The Point Spread
The first three letters on the top two lines of the three-line symbols represent 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 the spread or the point spread. Wagers on the point spread are among the most popular sports wagers globally. This wager is famous because it doesn’t matter which team wins or loses; the number of points the team scores 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 New York Giants and the underdog will always be indicated with a plus sign in our example. 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. Your bet is lost if the Cowboys win by less than 8 points.
A wager on the Giants on the spread does not mean that New York has to win the game for you to win cash. The G-Men must 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 on. If you’re confident that New York will at least come within a touchdown of beating the Cowboys or beating them outright, you will 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 total number instead of a number with a half-point, your wager could end up as a push.
In our example, if the line were seven instead of 7.5 and the absolute difference in points was precisely 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 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 to 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 how 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 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 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?
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.
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 to win $100. If you were to bet the over-under on this game, you’d 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.
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 gives a lot of information in a tiny 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.
