One overlooked number can make betting decisions much clearer. Learn how to use hold percentage to compare markets, evaluate prices, and find better places to bet.
Back to VideosDo you know the biggest advantage a bettor has over sports books? It's big enough to flip a losing approach to a winning one. And most bettors never think about it this way. It's that you don't have to make a bet. You can pass. The sports books don't have that luxury. They have to take action on every bet they offer, but you don't have to bet anything that you don't want to. And that fact means there's a clear, logical starting point for every single bet. It's nuts because once you understand how hold works, it's a massive shortcut for your entire betting process.
Once you admit that you don't have to bet everything, the logical step is to prioritize what you do bet. The first priority should be to find the easiest bets to win. You don't have to guess which bets are the easy ones. The hold literally tells you. It's a cheat sheet the sports books give you every time they set a price. And I'm going to show you why that's a thing that will change the way that you bet. Pick a day like January 20th, 2007. It was the conference championship weekend. Chargers and Pats in the AFC and the Giants and Packers in the NFC.
It's that game where Tom Coughlin's face looked like it was going to freeze solid and fall off by halftime. In the 2007 NFC Championship, the Giants were an eight-point underdog to the Packers. Patriots laid 14 at home minus 110 each way. If you started that day by looking at the Green Bay defense or the Chargers run game, maybe you could have handicapped your way to some winning bets. But chances are you were wasting your time on a game with high liquidity, sharp, efficient lines, and a higher degree of difficulty. And here's where most people absolutely butcher the math.
So, let me show you the fast way the pros actually do it. The secret is in the minus 110 each way part. When both sides of a bet are priced at minus 110, that bet has about a 4 1/2% hold. What I mean is that when all the bets are counted up and paid out, the sports books can expect to keep about 4 1.5% of the total amount wagered as they're cut. It's similar to the ideas of the vig, but not exactly the same.
If the vig is how much you and everyone else personally pays in taxes, the hold is more like how much the government nets after they send out all the refund checks, the extremely stingy, grudgingly issued refund checks. And you can find the hold for any bet. We have a calculator at Unabated to do it, and we show you the hold on our odds screen, but here's a quick hack to estimate it manually for yourself. Just convert each side's price into a probability and add them together. Then divide the overound, which is the amount that's over 100%, by the total combined probability. That's it. You can usually ballpark this in your head if you don't have a calculator handy.
It's that simple. The lower the hold, the easier a bet is because you can afford to be wrong more often. If a sports book holds 1%, you have to be right about 50.5% of the time. But if the hold goes up to 10%, you have to be right about 56% of the time just to break even. And if you think I'm exaggerating the power of lowhold markets, wait till you hear what authors Ed Miller and Matt David have to say. Imagine a perfect utopia where there's no sports book hold whatsoever. That's the scenario that Miller and David Al set up in The Logic of Sports Betting.
It's a must-read book if you want to know more about how sports betting works in general. Now, they said first, there would be no penalty for dart throwing. You could bet completely at random and you would not lose over time. That's a pretty big deal. If you're wrong, it's break even. If you're right, the bets make money. You're almost guaranteed to be profitable over time doing this. Think about it like Ghostbusters. When Bill Murray is giving the ESP test, there's a guy and a girl guessing what shapes are on random cards. When the guy gets one wrong, Bill zaps him with an electric shock.
But when the girl gets one wrong, he lies and tells her she's right and talented and special. The guy has more downside to being wrong. That's like betting into high hold markets. The only downside for the girl is she might have to go on a date. That's a no hold market. The worst thing that happens to you is you have dinner with Bill Murray. And if you're betting into the same market over and over again, well, that's Groundhog Day, and that's a different movie. Overcoming the hold is the only way that you can win in the long term. You're going to be wrong some percent of the time, but low hold markets are ultimately more forgiving when you lose.
So, what should you do on a day like January 20th, 2007?
Instead of trying to find an opinion on the Giants or Patriots, you should start with markets that offer a lower hold. Look around for those softer landing spots and find your bets there first before you take on the tougher markets. It's exactly the opposite of how most bettors go about their business. But if you fundamentally rewrite your process to do it this way, you're going to be much more profitable in the long run. If you can find a hold below zero, even better. They do exist, but they don't last long. Usually holds below zero mean you found an arbitrage or a potential middle. And here's the part that books dread.
You should use a sports book as just one data point, not as your entire ecosystem. You're not going to find low holds on both sides of a bet at just one sports book. But you can do it by creating synthetic markets. This is another concept out of the logic of sports betting. Synthetic markets are ones where you take the best favorite price at one book and the best underdog price at another and look at what the hold is when you put them together. And when there's less house edge to overcome, there's more margin for error in the times you're wrong or when your edge just isn't as strong as you think.
You don't need as much of an edge to put yourself into a profitable situation. Spotting the hold helps you save time, too. If a market has an impossibly high hold, don't bother banging your head against the wall trying to find an edge.
Skip it. Move on. And see if there's an easier spot for you to hit first. If you start first by hunting for low hold markets and then consider any handicapping, you're making your life infinitely easier in the long run. This isn't just theory, either. You can look at baseball markets where lines are often priced tightly together. You can regularly find baseball markets for sides and totals where the hold is less than 2%. Often less than 1%. Synthetic markets go hand in hand with line shopping.
But they also allow you to avoid bets where your edge isn't able to overcome a high hold market. You'll never be right 100% of the time. So you have to make sure that you're not losing so much when you lose that it can't make up for when you win.
