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But that is the whole game right there. It isn't an exception it's the topic. Equal action happens all on it's own. Nobody can make any of us choose one side or the other of the line. We choose which side we like. It's only because Vegas is really good at it that it *happens* to come out 50/50 a lot of the time. There is no way to engineer a 50/50 initial line unless the line itself is super accurate, and based on football. After that everything is 100% market reaction.
I don't know that I agree that setting the initial line is the whole game. If Vegas' experts calculated that the spread ought to be 5.0, and the common bettors at large think 7.5 makes a lot more sense, I would think it would relatively quickly move to 7.5 after the line goes public. And vice versa.
Right. Vegas isn't pulling lines out of a hat saying "we'll fix it later". What I meant above about lines moving is the reaction, but it seems to me that they rarely move more than a point unless something crazy happens. So they are pretty good at getting it close to where it should be from the start.
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This is pretty much where I am at. They remain an accurate indicator, or as you said they would crumble from incoming bets.
I'm not sure that anyone is saying they preemptively set the odds in the opposing direction from how they think the bettors will bet. They change the odds/spread formulaically as the bets actually come in, if those bets are falling heavily on one side. If far more bets were coming in for tails -- if it were my operation, anyway -- I would be shifting the odds.
Even if that were to cross a point where you are offering bets to punters that are clearly +EV for the punter?
Punters?
There's a writer Michael Konik who wrote a book about sports gambling called The Smart Money. He appears briefly in a documentary called The Best of It. He talks about how when he started writing the book he thought the books wanted equal action on both sides. You can watch the documentary free on YouTube (definitely worth watching the whole thing). Konik talking about the equal action myth starts at 31:42.
The Best of It
All good runs come to an end. The best of it takes an unflinching look at the life of a professional gambler. The character-driven documentary focuses on the...
Generic English term for someone having a bet. Nothing to do with Shane Lechler etc. My bad thinking the term would be known over there.
I would say yes. As long as I had done the math regarding the caveat in my original post. That being, the concern where winners (and losers) can overlap from both sides given certain outcomes if the line has moved. So that part I will say I do not know for sure. But if, hypothetically, I can do something to spread out my profit such that I make the same no matter what -- assuming my expected return stays fixed -- I'm definitely doing that. Now, if there is a way to actually increase the expected return, but the payoff becomes less uniform, I could definitely be persuaded to do that, depending on the numbers. That may be a key factor in what you and others are saying.
Good info here, and I'd say both of these are likely the case. They set it based on what they THINK will happen, but the line moving is almost purely based on the action that comes in either way.There's a writer Michael Konik who wrote a book about sports gambling called The Smart Money. He appears briefly in a documentary called The Best of It. He talks about how when he started writing the book he thought the books wanted equal action on both sides. You can watch the documentary free on YouTube (definitely worth watching the whole thing). Konik talking about the equal action myth starts at 31:42.
The Best of It
All good runs come to an end. The best of it takes an unflinching look at the life of a professional gambler. The character-driven documentary focuses on the...
You're asking which books do I see reverse line movement on? All of them. If you're asking which sites show splits and handle, I think many do. For sure Draftkings. Sportsbook.ag, BetMGM and a few others. You can also find percentages on sites like Action Network, vegasinsider, VSIN (pay site), etc. where they get data directly from the sportsbooks.
The hypothesis is that when people are betting one side, the payoffs shift toward the opposite side, or the spread shifts toward the same side. So if the line drops from 9 to 8, according to the hypothesis at least, that would indicate that more people are putting bets on the underdog than the favorite.
But they're not. The majority of the money is coming in on the favorite. We can see the live data.
They can’t get balanced action on most games. To do so, they’d have to move the lines so much that they’d risk creating a massive middle, putting themselves in a position to lose both sides. The vig gives the book a built-in edge, but they still win or lose different amounts on individual games. A bookmaker’s job is to manage risk and decide where they’re willing to be exposed on a given game. Futures, teasers, and other liabilities also have to be factored into that equation.
Exactly this.
I think of course teasers and whatnot is also factored in.
Oh, okay, yeah, I didn't know you could see the data. If that's the case, yeah, I guess they're doing something that I don't understand.
Problem is, if the line moves too much, they risk losing a lot of money if the end result is somewhere between where they started and the final line.
Yeah, I agree here as well.
It's why I tend to respect the odds more than individual opinions on those odds.
