Betting Line Analysis

This page is more in depth look at comparing value between betting outlets. Expected value is a very important concept for professional handicappers. If you find these concepts difficult to understand you can always compare different lines very simply by looking at the decimal line. The higher the decimal line the better value you will be getting on that wager given everything else is the same. American lines are almost as simple, the higher the plus line or the lower the minus line is the better value.

Canadians will also have a tie option for some games; this changes the probability so a higher decimal line does not automatically reflect better value. For simplicity sake only win-loss games are compared. There is also a calculator with entertainment value included so you can see exactly what the increased excitement of betting on a game is costing you.

Break Even Percentages

The break even percentage is just the theoretical percentage of games you need to win to break even for the given line. For instance if you wager on Sport Select (-143 or 1.7), Vegas Line (-110 or 1.909) and Pinnacle Sports (-105 or 1.952) you need to win 58.82%, 52.38% and 51.22% respectively to break even on these neutral lines. If profit is your goal than again Pinnacle Sports offers the path of least resistance. The calculator below can be useful for determining what different lines mean as far as required break even winning percentages. You can see our break even table found in the table section for more totals. If your interested in seeing the actual calculations you can also see our calculations section.

Break Even Calculator

It is important to note that if the sports book figures there is a 66.67% of the team winning they will not use a -200 (1.50) line. If you see a -200 (1.50) line then the sports book is really expecting the team to win less than 66.67% of the time. This can be a little counterintuitive so let us consider the simpler 50% outcome; given this expected outcome the sports book will lower their payouts by roughly the amount mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph. If you see a team that has a -110 (1.909) line than a sports book that uses a 10% margin is expecting the said team to win 50% of the games; and not the 52.38% break even point. The point here is that the sports books' expected probabilities will always be less than the break even point, in other words you will almost always be facing roughly the same margins.

Expected Value

Expected Value (EV) refers to the theoretical expected outcome of placing a wager. So if our winning percentage is 50% and we place a wager on a neutral Pinnacle line like over -105 (1.952) and under -105 (1.952), then our expected value of a $100 bet is -$2.40. So not surprisingly if we expect to win exactly 50% of our wagers we will lose money. However we did save some money by choosing Pinnacle in our earlier bet, if we had made the same bet using the Vegas line or sport select we would have had an EV of -$4.55 and -$15.00 respectively. Of course we could have concluded all this from the break even analysis we did before hand. Sport Select users can also expect similar losses when placing home-tie-away Pro-Line wagers; we have left out these examples for simplicity purposes. There is a Pro-Line EV example in our calculations section .

Entertainment Value

Since very few of us will ever become professional handicappers it is probably more realistic to focus on entertainment value. The entertainment expense of sports betting is an extension of expected value. In fact sports betting can be a reasonably cheap source of entertainment. For example, if we take our EV example of betting $100 on a game at Pinnacle Sports then from an expected value perspective we are theoretically paying $2.40 for that game. Of course you do not have to wager $100 per game, you can place wagers as low as one dollar or unit in your currency. If you are able to become a sharp enough to win 1.22% more than the sports book's expected probabilities you can actually make money at this. If you are just a casual bettor than you will most likely have a 50% win rate for the calculator below.

Expected Value Calculator

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*While all efforts are taken to ensure calculations are correct they are subject to error and change. All results on this site should be treated as estimates and used for entertainment purposes only. If you find any discrepancies between our results and their respective sources please contact us so corrections can be made.

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