How to Read Betting Lines

Jan 22, 2019 To do this, the Plus Minus count is used to keep a running total of the 'count'. As a player sees cards in action, they assign the following numbers and keep a running count in their head. With a new deck or a new shoe, the count will always start at zero. Again, with all kinds of betting, the minus-sign means a favorite, with the plus-sign designating an underdog. The Twins are +165. That means you win $165 for every $100 you bet. When you see a plus-sign with any number, that number is what you win for every $100 you bet.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The Revere Advanced Plus Minus Card Counting system is an
advantage play technique for blackjack that was originally
presented in Lawrence Revere’s book, Playing Blackjack as a
Business. It’s a simple and straightforward system for
beginners, which makes it unusual among the multiple counting
systems that Revere published in that book.

This page explains how the system works, how you can use it,
and what the pros and cons of the system are.

How The Revere Advanced Plus Minus Card Counting System
Works

All card counting systems work by tracking (in an approximate
way) the ratio of high cards to low cards in the blackjack deck.
When the deck has a higher number of high cards than low cards,
the counter raises the size of his bets. When the opposite is
true, the counter lowers his bet sizes.

Here’s how that works:

• The biggest payoff you can hope for in blackjack is for
  a natural, or a blackjack. That’s a 2 card hand with a total
  of 21. You can only get dealt a blackjack if you get an ace
  and a 10.
• If a deck of cards has more aces and 10s in it than
  usual, your chances of getting dealt a hand with this higher
  payoff increases, and vice versa.
• By raising your bets when you have a chance of getting
  that higher payoff, you reverse the odds. Instead of the
  casino having an edge of 0.5% over you, you have AT LEAST an
  edge of 0.5% against them. Maybe even as much as 1% or 2%.
• And you don’t have to memorize the deck or the cards
  that have been dealt, either. You just need a system that
  tracks these numbers in a general way. This is done by
  assigning values to the high and low cards and tracking a
  total count as the cards are dealt.
• The high cards count as negative, and the low cards
  count as positive. The more low cards that have been dealt,
  the higher the ratio of high cards to low cards gets. And
  vice versa.

The Revere Advanced Plus Minus Count is a single level,
balanced system. You only have to add + or – 1 for each card you
see. (Some cards are 0.) And there are an equal number of +1s as
there are -1s, so the count at the end of counting through a
deck winds up at 0.

When the count is positive, you raise the size of your bets.
When it’s 0 or negative, you bet the table minimum. The higher
the count, the more you bet. It’s that simple.

Just remember to start over at 0 when they reshuffle the
deck.

How to Use the Revere Advanced Plus Minus System to Get an
Edge at Blackjack

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The cards in this counting system have the following values:

• 9s and 10s: -1
• 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s: +1
• All other cards: 0

When you see those cards, increase or decrease the
count accordingly.

This system works best in single deck games. It doesn’t
really offer any significant advantages over other single level
balanced systems. Most card counters are using something similar
called the Hi Lo System as their starter counting system, but
some players do like Lawrence Revere’s approach.

Be more likely to take insurance if the count is positive,
but be careful. The casino knows that this is a good indicator
that someone might be counting. The reasons for taking insurance
in this case should be obvious—with more aces and 10s in the
deck, the dealer has a better chance of having a blackjack, too.

Playing Blackjack as a Business and the Pros and
Cons of Revere’s Systems

Playing Blackjack as a Business is one of our
favorite blackjack and card counting books. It features a number
of beautifully colored and drawn tables which explain the
intricacies of basic strategy and the changes you should make
based on the count. An even more interesting but related book is
Lance Humble’s opus, The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book.
In it, he relates several anecdotes related to his experiences
playing with and learning from Lawrence Revere, who was
apparently quite a character. In one story, Revere showed him
that he had filched the 5s from a deck of cards and was throwing
them away in the bathroom. The 5s have the biggest negative
effect on the players’ odds of any card in the deck, so by
eliminating them from the deck, Revere had insured better odds
for all the players at the table. The accuracy of that story is
unknown to us.

Most of the systems in Revere’s book are quite a bit more
complicated than this one. In fact, I’m not sure why he billed
this as being “advanced” when he named it. Maybe he thought that
would make it seem more valuable to prospective customers.

This system is strong enough to use with a single deck game,
but it’s not well-designed to be used in a game
with multiple decks.

If you do use it for such purposes, you’ll
need to convert the running count into a true count. That’s not
too hard to do—here’s a quick primer on that:

The running count is the true count in a single deck game,
but in a game with multiple decks, the effect of one card being
dealt is diluted by the number of cards in the deck. It’s easy
to understand how dealing one card has the effect based on 1
card out of 52. But in a game with 2 decks, it’s only 1 card out
of 104—so it doesn’t have as big an effect on your odds. That
dilution effect increases with more decks in play.

To account for this, you take the running count and divide it
by the number of decks left in the shoe. (You have to learn how
to estimate this.) That will give you the true count. It’s more
complicated this way, but it provides you with a better estimate
of your edge. If you raise your bet in an 8 deck game according
to the running count, you can run into big trouble.

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Summary

The Revere Advanced Plus Minus Card Counting System is a
little bit of antique in today’s advantage play market. It’s
simple enough to use, but other more modern systems provide a
better bang for your buck. The book, Playing Blackjack as a
Business is worth reading, though—the presentation is excellent.
The author, Lawrence Revere, was one of the true characters of
the sport.