In the world of sports betting the first thing you will need to learn is to read and understand the odds. There are three traditional ways that online sports betting sites display odds. They include American, Decimal, and Fractional.

Regardless of how the odds are displayed, they’ll always mean the same thing. Watching the UFC, the odds format they talk is American Odds or Vegas Odds. Essentially what they are is the percentage of one outcome against another.

Welcome to the Sports Betting Odds section of The Sports Geek. If you are new to sports betting and don’t understand how to read betting odds (+150, -110, +2200, etc) we will lay it all out for you and help you learn how the betting odds work.

1. In sports betting, each team is assigned odds that represent the likelihood of them winning the game. When the odds for two teams are even, meaning 1 to 1, it means that each team is equally as likely to win the game. If Team A is assigned 2 to 1 odds, it means Team B is twice as likely to win.
2. Decimal Style Sports Betting Odds. Decimal style odds are used mostly in Europe, and are pretty easy to understand. To calculate the decimal style odds all you will need to do is simply.
3. Nov 04, 2020 The three main types of betting odds are fractional (British) odds, decimal (European) odds, and American (moneyline) odds. These are simply different ways of presenting the same thing, and hold no.

You can use our UFC Odds Calculator to work out percentages yourself.

We have a live odds tool on our site that you’ll notice on lots of our pages. We post live odds in American and Decimal format, but we don’t list live odds in the Fractional format.

The reason we don’t list live odds using Fractions on our site is that we don’t want to confuse bettors. Fraction odds are becoming more extinct every year, and many online sportsbooks have stopped posting odds using fractional odds entirely.

The betting odds are one of the most important factors in deciding on whether to bet on a game or not. If you study a UFC fight and determine that Jon Jones has a 60% chance of beating Mauricio Rua, then you’re going to need to find out if the odds are better than that.

Using our 60% example, we need to check to see if the odds are going to allow us to be profitable if Jones does win 60% of the time in this fight. You can use our betting calculator to check what the odds mean in percentage terms.

To break even betting on an outcome that is predicted to hit at a 60% rate you need to be getting odds of -150. If you’re getting better odds, i.e., -150 to a positive number (+100), then it’s a +EV bet to make, and you should place the bet.

We’re going to explain how to read the three different types of betting odds below, so make sure you check out both the American and Decimal formats if you don’t know how to read them yet.

American Betting Odds Explained

• Jon Jones -205 vs. Mauricio Rua +165

American odds are shown using whole numbers above 100, and they can have a positive or negative value. When the odds have a negative value, the odds will be presented with a (-) in front of the number whereas when the odds have a positive value they will have a (+) sign in front of the odds.

To understand how much you can make you need to remember one rule. When the odds are positive (+), the number reflects how much you’ll make on a $100 wager whereas if the odds are negative (-), the number reflects how much you need to bet to win $100 profit.

If you bet on Jones at -205 you need to risk $205 to win $100 profit and if you bet on Rua to win you’d win $165 profit for every $100 you bet.

The fighter with the negative value is ‘usually’ considered the favorite, and if both fighters have a negative value, then the fighter with the higher number is the favorite.

E.g:

• Fighter A: -105
• Fighter B: -109

Fighter B is considered the favorite in this matchup.

It’s rare for two fighters in MMA to both have negative value odds, but it does happen when two extremely evenly matched fighters fight against each other.

Decimal Betting Odds Explained

• Jon Jones 1.49 vs. Mauricio Rua 2.65

Decimal odds are used in most countries outside of North America, so we include decimal odds on our site for punters. Decimal odds are also known as European odds.

To understand decimal odds you always need to remember that your stake and profit are included in the odds. For instance, Jon Jones is favored to win the fight at 1.49 odds. If you bet $100 on Jones at 1.49, you’d win $149 back, which includes your stake and profits.

How To Understand Betting Odds In Football

You’d win your $100 back plus make $49 profit.

If you bet on the underdog Rua in the fight for $100 at odds of 2.65 you’d win back $265, which includes your $100 stake plus $165 in profit.

To find out how much you can win using decimal odds you multiply the odds by how much you want to bet.

Fractional Betting Odds Explained

• Jon Jones 49/100 vs. Mauricio Rua 33/20

We want to say that we believe fractional odds are going to become less used, and therefore we don’t recommend using them unless you’re betting on horses.

If you’re betting on MMA, you should use Decimal odds, as every bookie offers Decimal odds and they’re easy to use when trying to figure out your profit.

If you need to be able to read fraction odds, they’re simple. The 1st number in the fraction is how much you’re paid out based on the 2nd number, which is how much you need to stake.

For instance, if you bet on Jones at 49/100 odds you need to calculate 49/100 x “Wager Amount” to come up with how much you’ll make. If you bet $100 (49/100 x $100 = $49) you’d make $49 plus receive your $100 stake back.

The evolution of exchange betting has revolutionised market-making to such a degree that even the biggest bookmaker names no longer employ professional odds setters.

Understanding Betting Odds In Sports

How did odds making start?

As touched on in our Brief History of Betting blog, the concept of calculating the likely chance of a winner in a horse race, and converting that into bookmaker odds, was devised by one Harry Ogden.

Operating on Newmarket Heath towards the end of the 18th century, Ogden was the first bookmaker to take betting beyond its strikingly crude roots. Most early bets were simply a way of settling an argument over whether a named event would come to pass or not.

Not only did Ogden begin the process of making a book, he also understood that he had to save a percentage of his takings for his own purse. In order to achieve this, he slightly adjusted prices in his favour. It worked: if somebody won a bet and got paid out at odds of 4/1 they were unlikely to complain, especially at this early stage, that they had not been paid at the true probability of 5/1.

So already, within Ogden’s lifetime we witnessed the evolution of a book featuring a range of prices as well as the concept of what is now known as an “overround”.

What is an overround book?

Understanding Betting Odds Football

A perfect book, without factoring in a margin for the bookie, would mean the implied probability of all outcomes would add up to 100%. However, bookies use the concept of overround to stretch this probability greater than 100% – which then becomes their profit.

Here’s an overround example from a tennis match:

Now, have you ever considered why bookmakers like to encourage accumulators in sports like football where punters enjoy backing multiple selections in a single bet?

Well it’s simple: if a bookmaker has an overround of 105% on each of five football matches, a punter placing a bet in all five of those matches is betting against an overround 125% because the extra 5% is factored in each time.

The growth of betting and odds compiling

By the 1950s the big firms that covered the length and breadth of the country betting on horses and greyhounds were already employing odds-makers to help them compile what was known as the “tissue” for each race.

This was effectively the first show of prices. Bookmakers would certainly collude to some degree to check their assessments of the market were not wildly out of place but by and large they were happy to trust their instincts.

The prices were not static: they moved to respond to market forces after the first show was published on the boards.

What did a bookie do if he felt liabilities were in danger of getting too big on a particular horse? All he had to do was rub off the displayed price on his chalkboard and put up a less attractive price. He might then balance his book by pushing out the prices of less fancied runners.

The advent of legal betting shops

The golden age of betting was triggered by the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act – a watershed development that allowed betting on racing and greyhounds to take place in licensed shops around the country.

For the first time, punters did not need to be physically at a racecourse or dog track to legally place a bet. There was still an incentive for big-time punters to go racing because if they were betting in shops they had to pay tax.

Understanding Betting Odds Calculator

But bookmakers small and large had to be on the lookout to protect themselves against betting coups in what was now “open season” for big-stakes punters. If, for example, a group of individuals could target multiple betting shops at the same time soon before the start of a race it was hard in the pre-internet age to ensure the price was cut in time.

The Yellow Sam plot of 1975 was a perfect illustration of how a meticulously organised plot could evade the best attempts of the bookies to minimise their exposure.

The 1990s: Multiple sports, multiple platforms

When restrictions were lifted on football betting to unlock a wide range of markets on individual matches, horse racing’s dominance as a sports betting medium was challenged for the first time.

At the same time, firms were opening more and more shops, allowing telephone and online accounts while accessing more and more global television feeds.

This was the decade in which odds-compilers really earned their corn for bookies like Coral, Ladbrokes and William Hill – traditional names with presence on the high-street, at the courses and, bit by bit, on rudimentary web browsers too.

Sports traders and palps

If, for example, you were a graduate with a good degree in maths or economics and you also followed rugby union religiously you could be hired specifically to draw up rugby union markets for one of the big operators.

With so much sport to bet on, and so many new avenues from which to glean useful information, this was also the time that “palps” (bookie slang for palpable errors) were at their most prevalent.

Shrewd punters could sometimes find out if an obscure tennis match or an overseas domestic football game had been rescheduled to an earlier time slot. If the bookies were unaware they could find themselves accepting a bet on an event that had already happened.

How exchanges changed the landscape

The arrival of Betfair into an increasingly cluttered market in 2000 proved a positive intervention in a number of ways, even if some small on-course bookmakers to this day rue the dawn of exchange betting.

Betfair had a huge USP: it was allowing markets to be set by individuals trading on its platforms hours and sometimes days in advance. The prices were not set by individual odds-makers using personal assessment.

Over the intervening 20 years, the exchanges have had their ups and downs but for bookmakers they provide two major positives which serve as some sort of compensation for draining them of the business they once did.

Firstly, by using the wisdom of the crowd, exchanges establish robust markets relatively quickly meaning betting companies no longer need to invest so heavily in their own odds-makers.

Secondly, the exchanges provide an easy mechanism for bookmakers to lay off worrying liabilities and can even provide early warning of a potential betting coup attempt.

What is BetConnect’s role in the market?

BetConnect is a hybrid solution that combines many of the strengths of the Betfair model – it is, after all, a peer-to-peer exchange – alongside the reassurance of big bets being matched without restrictions.

Available prices quoted are based on real-time markets provided by a wide range of online bookmakers. The platform gives bettors reassurance that they are getting the best bookie prices while layers know where to head for matched betting opportunities.

BetConnect’s single biggest advantage is its ability to fuse three disparate groups of individuals:

1. Professional punters who have grown frustrated by restrictions imposed on them by the bookies
2. Recreational players who enjoy backing and laying selections
3. The growing community of matched betting enthusiasts

If you think you’re ready to bet on horse racing or any other sport then sign up for a BetConnect account now. BetConnect is the only exchange that lets you back selections at bookie odds with no restrictions, and lay the selections of other account-holders commission-free. Not sure how it works? Read this simple guide.

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