Moneyline

The moneyline is the simplest bet in sport: pick the winner. Everything else in a sportsbook is a variation on it.

How the price works

Because teams are unequal, the odds do the balancing rather than a handicap.

• Favourite: −180. Risk $180 to win $100.
• Underdog: +160. Risk $100 to win $160.

In decimal that is 1.56 and 2.60. The gap between the two implied probabilities is the margin.

Moneyline versus spread

The same match offers two very different propositions.

A team at −7.5 on the spread might be −320 on the moneyline. Backing the spread asks “will they win by eight or more?”; backing the moneyline asks only “will they win?”.

For heavy favourites the moneyline is expensive. Risking $320 to win $100 leaves no room for error. For underdogs it is the reverse: a +7.5 spread bet needs a close loss, while the moneyline needs an outright upset but pays several times more.

The practical rule most bettors settle on: take the spread with favourites, consider the moneyline with underdogs.

Three-way markets

In sports where draws are common, football above all, the moneyline usually becomes a three-way market: home, draw, away. All three must be priced, which spreads the margin across more outcomes.

Books also offer draw no bet, where a draw voids the bet and returns the stake. It is effectively a two-way moneyline, and the price is shorter to reflect the removed risk. This is the same idea as Asian handicap at a zero line.

Where the value tends to sit

Heavy moneyline favourites are generally poor value, because the price leaves so little margin for the unexpected while offering a small return. A −500 shot needs to win 83.3% of the time to break even, and almost nothing in sport is that reliable once you account for the ways a match can go wrong.

Moderate underdogs, roughly +150 to +250, are where research most often finds mispricing, far enough from the longshot bias to avoid its overpricing, but unpopular enough with public money to escape being shortened.