A Guide to Understand Betting Odds

If you are planning to start betting—be it casino gambling, sports betting, or any other type—it’s important to understand the odds. Placing bets intelligently requires having a good grip on the main types of betting odds and the ability to read and interpret their various associated formats.

Betting odds are compiled by bookmakers as a way to represent what they believe is the likelihood is of an event or events happening.

Understanding betting odds is extremely important and essential if you're going to have a successful betting career. The good thing is that it doesn't take much to read odds and the math isn't too complicated. Odds in different countries differ, but we're going to focus on American odds. You'll see these on all sportsbook sites in the United States and you'll see different titles, like team, spread, moneyline, and total. These are in terms of 100 and each one will have a plus or minus.

What is probability?
Probability is the likelihood of an outcome happening and is usually displayed as a percentage. For example, if we were to toss a coin, there are two possible outcomes. There’s a 50% chance that the coin will land on heads and a 50% chance that the coin will land on tails.

How to read betting odds
Now you know how to work out the probability of an event happening, you can use the betting odds to work out the potential returns if you were to bet on it. Fractional odds tell you the potential winnings in relation to the stake you place on the bet. For example, if you place a £1 bet on West Ham to beat Tottenham at 4/1, it will pay out £5 if successful (£4 profit plus your £1 stake). See below for more examples of how to read betting odds. Any odds in which the first number is bigger than the second are odds against, while any odds in which the first number is smaller than the second are odds on. Odds-on events are considered more likely to happen than not by bookmakers, and vice versa for events that odds against.

Fractional Odds
► Traditionally, odds in the UK are expressed as a fraction. These odds can be used to calculate your net profit (excluding your stake) and although they seem complicated the method of calculation is relatively straightforward.

This is best explained using an example. Let's say your bet is priced at 6/4 – in simple terms that means you need to stake £4 to win £6 (plus you'd get your £4 stake back). In terms of maths another way to express 6/4 is 6 divided by 4 which equals 1.5. So whatever your stake is you can multiply it by 1.5 to calculate your profit. So far so simple. But things do get a little bit more tricky when the odds are something like 11/8. The numbers may be more difficult but the principle is the same; 11/8 is the same as 11 divided by 8 which equals 1.375. Again, multiply this by your stake to calculate profit.

Decimal odds
► Decimal odds show us how much a winning bet will return, inclusive of our stake. We simply multiply our stake by the odds, to get our total returns. So, if we bet £1.00 on England to win the World Cup at odds of 10.00, we’ll get £10.00 back, which includes our £1.00 stake.

With a good grasp of how to understand odds, what they mean, and how they represent probability you'll be well on your way to becoming more successful at betting. That’s pretty much everything you need to know about betting odds and how they work. readmore...