Sports Betting 101
Learn the fundamentals of sports betting: markets, spreads, moneylines, parlays, line shopping, and tracking your results.
How this section is organized
Sports betting has its own vocabulary, but most of it comes back to two questions: what does this price imply, and how much does the book keep? The pages below start with the three core bet types and build up to market-level ideas like closing line value and arbitrage.
Bet types and prices
- Moneyline, spread and totals: the three core bet types side by side.
- How to read point spreads: favourites, underdogs and pushes.
- What juice (vig) means: the book’s built-in margin and how to see it.
- Props, futures and live betting: markets beyond the core three.
Parlays
- Parlay odds explained: how combined odds are calculated.
- Parlays and teasers: combining bets and moving spreads.
- Same-game parlays: correlation, pricing and risk.
Prices, markets and your record
- Line shopping: why comparing prices matters.
- Closing line value (CLV): are your prices better than the market’s final number?
- Arbitrage betting: how it works and its real limits.
- Hedging and middling: locking in a result or chasing a double win.
- Bankroll and units and units and tracking: staking plans and honest record keeping.
New to odds? Implied probability explained is the best place to start.