When you read NFL odds, you’ll first see the date and time of the game on the left and then immediately to the right, there will be two numbers with the name of each team next to one of each numbers. That number is called the rotation number. Rotation numbers are standard from sportsbook to sportsbook. Betting football parlay cards is as ingrained in the lives of millions of Americans as eating hot dogs and apple pie at the Fourth of July, and the football fun comes during the winter! No matter where you work, the odds are excellent that talk will turn to football during lunch breaks and those trips to the water cooler.

• How To Read Football Bets
• How To Read Betting Lines Football
• How To Read Bets Football Games
• How To Read Odds College Football
• How To Read Bets Football Players

So if a bunch of bets come in on one side, you might be inclined to go with it. But noting how small the percentage is of successful football bettors, you might want to fade the public-go the opposite way. BET ON NFL GAMES AT -105 REDUCED ODDS AT THE WEB'S BEST BETTING SITE: 5DIMES.

How to Read Betting Lines

How To Read Football Bets

If your sports betting experience consists mostly of office pools during March Madness or a casual wager between you and a friend while you watch the Super Bowl, the transition to serious sports betting means learning how to read betting lines. The biggest difference between making the kind of casual bets mentioned above and placing wagers with online sportsbooks or at brick-and-mortar bookshops is the use of sports betting lines. Casual wagers usually involve each person in the bet picking one team to win, then wagering an equal amount, say $20 or $30. Professional bookmakers, online sports betting exchanges, and sports betting facilities in casinos have a more complex system for offering wagers on sporting events, in part to ensure profit on the part of the book, and in part to present a standardized representation of odds.

How To Read Betting Lines Football

Let’s start with the basics: what do sports bettors mean when they talk about a ‘line?’ The word line, in the language of a sportsbook, can refer to either the odds and/or a point spread in any sports contest. Let’s take a look at an imaginary line the way you’d read it off the board sitting in a Vegas sports betting lounge or on the screen at your online book. Let’s imagine a game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys. Your book’s NFL betting line might look something like this:

DAL -7.5-110 -405
NYG +7.5-110 +300
56.5 ov-110

What may look like a jumble of words, numbers, and punctuation is actually a precise and easy-to-read breakdown of the various odds and point spread details your book is offering. Here is a breakdown of each unit of information given above. Once you understand each part of the jumbled details above, you’ll be able to read a sports betting line with confidence.

The Point Spread

Obviously, the first three letters on the top two lines of the three-line package of symbols represents a team in the game you’re wagering on; NYG stands for the New York Giants, while DAL stands for the Dallas Cowboys. The number next to each team’s name is known as the spread or the point spread. Wagers on the point spread are among the most popular sports wagers in the world. The reason this wager is popular is that it doesn’t matter which team wins or loses; what matters is the amount of points the teams score, and whether or not the team you place your money on beats the difference in points (the ‘spread’) or not.

Placing a point spread bet means gambling on how much a team will win or lose by. In our above example, the Cowboys are the favorite. How do we know that? The minus symbol in front of the point spread indicates that the bookmaker thinks the final score will have Dallas winning by 7.5 points or more. The underdog, in our example that’s the New York Giants, will always be indicated with a plus sign. If you wager on the Cowboys on the point spread, America’s Team will have to win by at least 8 points for your wager to pay off. Should the Cowboys win by less than 8 points, your bet is lost.

A wager on the Giants on the spread does not mean that New York has to win the game in order for you to win cash. All the G-Men have to do is come within 8 points of the ‘boys, and you’re a winner. You determine a winning or losing point spread by adding or subtracting 7.5 from the final score, depending on which side you laid your bet. If you’re confident that New York will at least come within a touchdown of beating the Cowboys, or beating them outright, then you’d wager on the spread in favor of New York.

A quick word on that annoying half point in the point spread – most lines you’ll come across will use half points, but it’s not standard practice across the board. When you see a line with a full number instead of a number with a half point, your wager could end up as a push. In our example, if the line were 7 instead of 7.5 and the final difference in points was exactly 7, your wager is returned to you, and neither you nor the book makes money.

How To Read Bets Football Games

What’s the function of the second number in the line?

The second number in our example (-110 for both teams) tells you how much you have to wager in order to win $100. It’s an easy way to calculate how much you’ll win if your bet pays off, presented in units of $100 at a time for simplicity’s sake. Most of the time, these two numbers will be the same, because oddsmakers want to set lines so that they get as much action on the underdog as on the favorite, guaranteeing them a profit. If a book gets a single bet of $110 (by a customer hoping to win $100) on the Cowboys and a single bet of $110 on the Giants, it will have taken in $220, but will only have to pay back $210 to whichever customer wins the bet. That’s a guaranteed profit of $10, and since sportsbooks take far more than a single bet in either direction, they stand to earn that seemingly small amount of profit many times over. The $10 difference between what you wager and what you win is known as juice or vig in the sports betting industry, and it’s the way books earn their bread and butter.

What does the last number in the line mean?

The last number in the top two rows of our sports line example is known as the money line. If you’re not interested in betting on the point spread, you can wager on a team to win outright. The plus sign next to the underdog (in our case, the Giants) indicates how much money you’ll earn for every $100 you bet on the money line. Conversely, the minus sign next to the favorite’s line tells you how much you have to wager in order to win $100. In our example, a $100 wager on the Giants earns you $300 should they pull off the upset, while a bet of $405 on the Cowboys will net you an extra $100. Representing odds in units of $100 makes placing different size bets easy; if you want to bet $10 on the Giants, you stand to earn $30 if they win, while a $40.50 bet on the Cowboys will net you an additional $10.

How To Read Odds College Football

What does the bottom row of numbers and letters mean?

The final line of information in our example line is the over-under. Wagers placed on the over-under have nothing to do with which team wins or the difference between the points they score, but rather the combined number of points both teams will score in the game.
The first number (56.5 in our sample line) is the book’s predicted total score, while the second number (110 in our Giants/Cowboys rivalry game) is how much a punter has to bet in order to win $100. If you were to bet the over-under on this game, you’ll have to decide whether you think the combined score of both teams will be higher or lower than the number put up by the book. Let’s say you bet the over, assuming the game will be a shootout between two talented offenses, you’re hoping that the final score will be anything that totals 57 or more. It could be Dallas 54, New York 3, or any other point combination that adds up to 57 or more and your bet will win. Betting the under means that the two teams cannot score more than 56 points combined, or else you lose your bet.

Reading sports betting lines becomes easier with practice and experience with different sporting events. What looks like a jumble of letters and numbers actually gives a lot of information in a tiny amount of space. Different sports have different types of wagers available, such as the run line in baseball or the puck line in hockey, both of which replace the money line found in our football example. The more experience you have watching and gambling on different sports, the faster you’ll be able to read betting lines.

Understanding Football Odds
by Trevor Whenham

Anybody who tells you that picking winners is football is easy is lying to you. There are seemingly a million different things that go into making successful picks, but all of that work is useless if you don't have good knowledge of odds. Fortunately, understanding football odds is really quite simple, and it is not nearly as intimidating as it can seem at first glance.

To bet on football, the first thing you have to understand fully is the point spread. There are lots of different ways to bet on football, but the large majority of bets are made on the point spread. It's a very rare game that has two teams that are perfectly evenly matched. In many cases the likely winner is quite obvious, so sportsbooks would lose a fortune if betting on football were as simple as picking the winning team. The most common way to even out the games is with a point spread.

Essentially, a point spread is a penalty that the better team has to overcome to win a game in betting terms. A point spread can be any half or whole number. Let's say, for example, that the Indianapolis Colts are seven point favorites against the New York Giants. You would most likely see this expressed at Indianapolis (-7) or something similar. What it means, essentially, is that oddsmakers have determined that Indianapolis is a touchdown better than the Giants over the course of a game. That means that the Colts have to win by more than seven points in order for you to win if you bet on them. If the Colts were to win the game by three points then they would not have covered the spread, so you would lose if you had bet on the Colts and win if you had bet on the Giants. If the Colts won by exactly a touchdown then the game would be called a push, or no action, meaning that neither team won and all bets would be returned.

Point spreads are set by the sports books, and you are guaranteed the point spread that is in place when you make your bet. In most cases, the books will try to have about the same amount of money bet on both teams, so you will often see the books adjust the point spread in the time leading up to the game so that one team seems more or less attractive to balance the bets. That means that it is possible for a bet on a team to be both a winner and a loser in the same game depending upon the spread. If the Bears started as a 2.5 point favorite and the spread then moved to 3.5 points because of the betting action, and the Bears won the game by a field goal, then the bettors who got the 2.5 point spread won, while the bettors who got the 3.5 point spread were losers.

How To Read Bets Football Players

Thinking about point spreads can be confusing. Thankfully, there are lots of different ways to think about spreads, so there is probably one that will make sense for you. You can make your adjustment before the game starts. In the Indianapolis example, you could think of the score being 7-0 for the Giants before the opening kickoff. That way you can keep score yourself as you watch the game from this starting point. I like doing it that way when I can, but most people prefer to make the adjustment to the final score. To do it that way you can subtract the point spread from the favorite's score, or you can add the point spread to the underdog's score. Depending on how you look at, then, the adjusted score in a game that had an actual score of 24-12 for the Colts would either be 17-12 or 24-19 depending upon how you look at it. No matter which way you choose, the result is the same - a bet on the Colts is successful, and a bet on the Giants is a loser.

There is some terminology you need to understand if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about. In our example of Indianapolis Colts -7 vs. New York Giants, the Colts are the team with the negative spread, so they are the favorites. Of course, that means that the Giants are the underdogs. If you bet on the Colts, the terminology is that you are 'giving' or 'laying' the points. That means that you are giving the underdogs the extra points. If you bet on the underdog you are 'taking' or 'getting' the points. It would also be perfectly acceptable to express the line as New York Giants +7 vs. Indianapolis Colts. If the actual score of the game is 24-12, then the Colts won the game straight up. Once the game is over and you have adjusted the score appropriately, you have determined the winner against the spread, or ATS. In this case, the Colts win both straight up, or SU, and ATS. If the final score had been 24-20 for the Colts, then Indianapolis would have won straight up, but the Giants would be the winners ATS.