Being familiar with odds. How to study bets probabilities

Sports Betting Odds

The fee you pay on each bet is there to make sportsbooks a profitable business, so make sure to factor that amount in when calculating what your potential profit is. In the modern era, most fixed odds betting takes place between a betting organisation, such as a bookmaker, and an individual, rather than between individuals. The sixteenth-century polymath Cardano demonstrated the efficacy of defining odds as the ratio of favourable to unfavourable outcomes. Implied by this definition is the fact that the probability of an event is given by the ratio of favourable outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes. The probability of an event is different, but related, and can be calculated from the odds, and vice versa. The probability of rolling a 5 or 6 is the fraction of the number of events over total events or 2/(2+4), which is 1/3, 0.33 or 33%.

Odds may be displayed differently depending on what the standard is for a particular sport. Refer to our guide’s section on American, fractional, and decimal odds to see different types of betting odds explained. The first thing you’ll notice with moneyline odds is that there is either a positive or negative sign in front of the number. What that sign denotes is how much you’ll win betting on each side.

In most cases, the sportsbook you’re betting with will do the calculations before you even place the bet. To win $100 on the Vikings , you would need to wager $130. If you bet $100 on the Packers , you’d be paid out $260 in addition to receiving your $100 bet back. The plus or minus indicates whether you’re betting on the favored team or the underdog. All of them are easy to understand, and we’ll show you in the upcoming sections of this article. These bets can be found for any sport, but are most common in low-scoring games like baseball, hockey, or soccer.

Point spread outcomes will most often pay this amount because the professional bookmakers are very good at predicting who will win any given game and by how many points. In doing so they are essentially making the point spread wager one that is as close to equal for both sides as possible. When you see a plus sign in front of a number (like +150 for example) it tells you which team is the underdog. You get a higher payout betting on the underdog since they’re less likely to win.

The biggest difference between fractional and decimal is that fractional tells you the potential profit while decimal tells you the return. Fractional odds are simply decimal odds represented as a fraction. If you were to read betting odds of -150 out loud, you would say “minus one fifty”.

Odds Shark does not target an audience under the age of 18. Please visit gambleaware.co.uk or gamcare.org.uk for guidelines on responsible gaming. A 4/1 bet is expected to win one in every five attempts, therefore the probability is 20%. Again it means the horse in question is expected to win the race. Things like this happen because a sportsbook wants to reduce risk to guarantee a profit.

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