By Only Players Staff
Updated 4/24/24 6:51am ET
It’s a term that is often misused and misunderstood.
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Sports betting is complicated and it can be intimidating as a new bettor. We’re here to help.
Mariah
Class is in session. Welcome to Betology 101. Betting terminology broken down by Professor Doug here. So our betting term for the day is odds on. Take it away.
Doug
It’s often misused as surprising as it sounds because people just assume it’s… People say odds on favor, which means like, oh, according to betting odds, they’re a favorite. It doesn’t. It’s to distinguish a favorite that is less than even money or i.e. above 50% likelihood. So if some team is an odds-on favorite, that means there’s a minus next to their odds. So for example, beginning of the football season, there’s 32 teams with NFL Super Bowl odds who’s gonna win it all. And the favorites like the Chiefs at four to one, Ravens, Eagles, things like that, none of those are odds-on, okay? But at the end of the year, when there’s maybe in the conference championship weekend, there’s only four teams left and the Chiefs are at home and they’re favored in the conference, AFC championship game. There’ll be like minus 180 to win it all when there’s only four teams remaining and that’s odds on favorite. So it’s a minus money. So we saw that with UConn this year when entering the final four, they were minus 200. So they were an odds on favorite. But the beginning of the tournament, they were not odds on favorite, they were just the favorite. So it just sort of an emphatic, like exclamation point,
It just means that their likelihood is the minus money in this minus 200 minus money, that translates to a percentage of what the, because they add them all up and they all equal 100%, right, all the teams that are remaining. So it just means above 50%. So in the UConn case, that’s 67% because it’s when they were minus 200. And the other three teams, all their percentages add up to 33.
Mariah
So if we’re looking at, say, if we go back to the Super Bowl example and you’ve got four teams remaining, Maybe if the Chiefs said minus 180, the Ravens are like minus 120. What is it? There’s just no odds on there. Right. Well, they, they met, they cannot both be minus money. Right. The only time is if you see like, if it’s a pick them in the Superbowl and they’re both minus 110, but the minus money, it means above 50%. So two teams can’t be above 50%. And then there’s two other teams. Now if both are pick them in the Superbowl, that’s just the, the juice or the little transaction costs that the house gets the key. Gotcha. Okay, so look for that little minus sign, there you have it, that’s your odds on, minus equals odds-on
