A sportsbook is a place where bettors can make wagers on different events. Typically, punters bet on football, basketball, baseball, and horse racing, but there are also betting options for other types of sports, such as soccer, esports, and greyhound racing. In addition to offering a wide variety of betting options, a sportsbook should have a user-friendly streamlined interface and good odds and lines to maximize profits for bettors.
In this article, we investigate how accurately the point spreads (or totals) proposed by a sportsbook capture the median margin of victory in a match. We use the empirically measured CDF of the margin of victory and total to develop confidence intervals for the regression parameters describing these quantities versus the sportsbook’s proposition, as well as confidence intervals on the expected profit of wagering conditioned on a fixed sportsbook bias (Figs 4 and 5).
The results indicate that for a typical sportsbook commission, a bettor who consistently bets on the side with the higher probability of winning against the spread will yield a negative expected profit. This result is robust to the choice of model used for estimating the CDF, the assumptions underlying that model, and the distribution of outcomes in the sample.
Since joining the Covers team in 2005, Jason has honed his handicapping skills to provide audiences with in-depth analysis of their favorite teams and games. He is under center for Covers during NFL season, and his first love is basketball, which he demonstrates in his popular NBA and WNBA betting breakdowns.
