Strategy
Line shopping
Checking multiple sportsbooks for the same bet and taking the best available price.
The same bet is rarely priced identically everywhere. One book has a team at −3 −110, another at −2.5 −105. Taking the better of the two costs nothing and improves every single wager you make.
It is the most reliably profitable habit in betting, and the least glamorous. Half a point on an NFL spread is worth a meaningful amount of expected value; the difference between −110 and −105 is roughly 2% of your stake. Compounded over a season, price shopping alone can be the difference between losing slowly and breaking even.
It requires accounts at several books, which is the actual barrier — not the effort of comparing.
Want the full version? Read the in-depth guide, with worked examples and the math.
See also
- Hold — The share of all money wagered on a market that the sportsbook keeps regardless of the result.
- Vig — The bookmaker's built-in margin — the reason both sides of a market add up to more than 100%.
- Closing line value — Whether the price you got was better than the price the market settled at by game time.
- Arbitrage — Betting both sides at different books at prices that guarantee a profit whatever happens.