The minus and plus signs are really important to pay attention to. Our goal is to make odds crystal clear so you feel comfortable knowing your first bets will be well-informed and well-placed.

We’re going to take you through it all step by step right here. Reading odds lines and understanding the concept of -110 is nowhere near as complicated as it seems. They represent how much a bet on each team pays out and they also show you which team is favored to win and how heavily they’re favored. What you’re looking at are American odds. At first glance, it can be pretty intimidating and you wouldn’t be the first person to give up right then and there. Some of these numbers have the plus symbol in front of them and others have minuses. Once the game begins, sportsbooks will close the betting market, and the odds at that time are called the “closing odds” or “closing line.For a first-time sports gambler, checking out odds and betting lines in a casino sportsbook can leave you feeling less than confident.Īll you want to do is make a simple bet but all you can see are an assortment of team names with numbers next to them, all of which, for some reason, are 110 or higher. Comparing that to the current odds shows what direction the market is moving. The “Open” is the odds when the sportsbook first introduced odds for that particular game into the market. When reading betting odds at a sportsbook, you may see the “opening odds” and the current odds. As the market gains more information (like betting trends), prices change based on that information. Betting markets are like any other market: prices fluctuate. Other factors such as injury updates or roster changes can also impact betting lines.

This creates a better balance between bets on each team. When this happens, the sportsbook will adjust the line to make it more appealing to place bets on the side getting less action. Of course, setting a point spread is an inexact science, and sportsbooks often do not get equal action on both sides of a point spread. If the bets are too heavily weighted towards one side, that increases liability for the sportsbook if that side of the bet ends up winning. Sportsbooks ideally want to have equal action on both sides of a bet. So it is more like a measure of public expectations rather than what will actually happen. The real answer is that sportsbooks set the number for the point spread based on what number they expect will lead to equal action (i.e. While this is true, it’s not exactly the most accurate answer. We said above that a point spread describes the expected margin of victory by the favored team in a given game.

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