Juice Betting
When referring to juice in a sportsbook we aren’t talking about the cranberry juice mixed with your vodka. Rather, juice is all about how much the sportsbook charges a bettor to make a bet. As a bettor, you want to minimize your losses and one way to accomplish that is by reducing the juice. This same term is also known as reduced “vig” or vigorish. Even though you may have an understanding of vigorish, the term reducing the juice can still be confusing. Let’s get an understanding, break it down, discuss the pros and cons, and help choose which sportsbook to use.
For bettors to break even when betting at odds of -110, they need to win about 52.4% of their bets when the vig is factored in. How to calculate vig For standard odds of -110, the math has been done thousands of times over. The vig — or juice or amount kept by the sportsbook — is 4.54% at these odds. The term “Juice” is actually a slang term for Vigorish or “Vig”. In sports gambling is the amount of money or commission a sports book receives for taking your bet. Most of the time, the sports books takes a 10% cut for the amount of each wager, but the juice amount can vary from book to book and from sport to sport. For instance, most online sports book use 20% vig or juice for Baseball commission. Juice or vig is the amount of cut, or money, the bookmaker gets on your bet. This is the bookmakers commission off of your bet. Reduced juice means that the amount of commission is lower and therefore more money in your pocket. It is the easiest way for you to get the most value for your bets.
Picking a Sportsbook with Reduced Juice
Choosing between multiple sportsbooks can be done on the surface, but also requires research. On the surface, you’ll either see bonuses or not. The same goes for daily or weekly promotions.
Research is pivotal in finding reduced juice. Each day there are hundreds of sports with thousands of games being played. Every sportsbook wants to set their lines first to attract bettors.
Given the number of games you can find with different lines between the sportsbooks, reduced juice and line shopping go together. Remember, EVEN if it’s $5 that is a HUGE price to pay. Keep the money in your pocket!
The Best Reduced Juice Sportsbooks:
| Sportsbook | Reduced Juice Details | Start Betting |
| Pinnacle | Pinnacle’s confidence comes from their ability to provide reduced juice betting instead of standard bonus promotions, with a (-105) offering every day. This will be a huge benefit for those wanting to avail of reduced juice for their high betting limits across all sports. | Visit Site |
The best system would be to have accounts across several sportsbooks. This will allow you to take advantage of attractive special bonuses and reduced juice odds. Sports betting is no different than other industries in that scenarios, strategies, and circumstances change so allowing yourself to be flexible can aide in your survival.
What Is Reduced Juice?
The juice is a term that describes the commission charged by the sportsbook on a bet. So naturally, we would want to drive that commission cost down, hence reduced juice. A bettor wants to profit a minimum of $100 for every $100 bet placed. A goal of the sportsbook is to have the bettor risk more than $100 to win $100. This is the juice. Bookmakers want to set the odds as high as possible while still enticing the bettor to place action. Therefore, anytime you can place a bet as close to +100 as possible you have reduced the juice.
How to Identify Reduced Juice
Using a typical NFL Sunday point spread, let’s look at how you find reduced juice.
In this illustration, at Sportsbook A, placing a bet on the Bills for a $100 profit will cost you $110. Whereas, at Sportsbook B, the same profit comes at only a $105 risk to you. By placing your bet at book B you have just saved yourself $5! Congratulations, now you’re betting like a seasoned veteran. In placing the bet at the -105 odds you have reduced the juice since the bookmaker is charging you $5 less. The same logic applies if you were to bet on the Patriots in the example above.
The Pros of Reduced Juice
There are a few reasons why reducing the juice is a required tactic if you want to be a successful long-term bettor. In an industry where the events are essentially a coin flip due to the bookie’s astute point spreads and odds, you need to give yourself any and all advantages possible. Here’s how reducing the juice can benefit your bankroll:
- Minimizing your losses. ALL bettors lose, so if you can save yourself $5 or $10 on each bet this will help your bankroll out tremendously over the long haul.
- Sportsbooks will allow bigger bet sizes. Everyone has those moments when they are really confident in a bet and want to put a little extra behind it.
- Easier to profit. Since your losses are less, betting with reduced juice means you don’t have to be as successful to turn a profit. You can win less often and still be just as successful if not more than someone not betting with reduced juice. Now is a good time for me to remind you that at -110 odds you would need to win 52.3% of your bets to become profitable. Anytime you can get under -110 will go a long way in lowering this percentage.
The Cons of Reduced Juice
Everything in life comes with a downside and reduced juice is no different. Here are a couple of unpleasant experiences when betting with reduced juice:
- Sportsbooks offer fewer free offers & bonuses. Take, for example, a 50% deposit bonus up to $250. That means if you deposit $250, the sportsbook matches that by 50%, meaning you would have a starting bankroll of $375. This might sound enticing but if you’re betting at -115 per say the extra cost of the bet consumes this “free” money pretty fast.
- Sharper lines. The sportsbook offering -105 may actually have the point spread at +2.5 rather than +3 and they’re covering the difference.
- Poor customer service. Because the sportsbooks are making less of a profit, oftentimes they cut costs in other areas of their business. That being said, if the sportsbook is well managed then you will rarely need to interact with customer service so this isn’t a big concern to me. If you contact them just be aware of things like slow response time.
What are Reduced Juice Limits?
The sportsbooks offering reduced juice will increase the wager maximum amount. Since they are charging you less, they attempt to reclaim some winnings by allowing you to bet more. Hoping you place a large bet on a 50/50 event is a happy scenario for the bookie.
Difference Between Reduced Juice and Bonuses
Think of the difference between reduced juice and bonuses in terms of how you want to acquire and spend your bankroll. A bettor using a sportsbook with a bonus system will initially have a larger bankroll. While having such a big bankroll can increase gives you confidence, watching the amount go down faster and faster with each bet will do anything but.
Remembering that the point spread essentially makes the event 50/50 will remind you that there are no guarantees in sports betting. I’d much rather have a smaller starting bankroll and act smarter, saving money on each bet. You’ll find the bonuses are a gimmick and keep you coming back.
Remember Less Juice the Better!
The next time you hear about reducing the juice you won’t be questioning the strength of your cocktail. Choosing which sportsbook to use might require time initially, but in the long run, your bankroll is saved. There is data that shows a successful bettor wins 55% of their bets, so there are a lot of opportunities to limit your losses. Regardless of how frequent you bet reduced juice is always the smart bet.
Click Here for our 3-Way No-Vig Calculator
The tool to the left can be used to calculate no-vig odds and no-vig win probabilities. For example, if the moneylines of an NFL football game are NY Giants -160 / Atlanta Falcons +140 novice bettors often make the mistake of assuming the fair odds without juice are Giants -150 / Falcons +150. This is a mistake, enter -160 and +140 into our no-vig calculator and you’ll see the actual no-vig odds are -148 / +148. If you’re thinking okay what’s 2 cents worth… try doing the same for Saints -600 / Lions +450. The novice bettor mistakes the fair odds as -525/+525 while our tool shows the actual no-vig odds are -471 / +471.
The reason this illustration is important is because a novice bettor finding -500 when all other sites have -600 will be overly excited feeling he’s most certainly found a +EV (positive expected value) bet. As shown in this illustration that’s often not the case. On -600/+450 beating the favorite line by 100 cents is still –EV (negative expected value). Meanwhile although still –EV getting +465 when all other sites had +450 would be a FAR better bet, and here he’s only found 15 cents better as opposed to the 100 cents better on the favorite.
How do Bookmakers Add Vig?
At the risk of losing the casual reader I’ll go ahead and answer this question. The bookmaker first decides on how much advantage he wants to add to a betting line. For example if he has the probabilities as 82.5% favorite / 17.5% underdog and he wants to keep around 3.75% of the wagered amount on balanced action he’ll add this to each probability. .825*1.0375=0.8559 (85.59%) and 0.175*1.0375=0.1816 (18.16%). To see what these are in American odds, head over to our odds converter and in the implied probability field enter 85.59% to see this is -594. Next enter 18.16 to see this is +450.66. The bookmaker has a large enough advantage here so with the desire to use round about numbers he’ll most likely set the odds at -600 / +450. The juice is roughly the same on each as remember 6 cents added to a -594 price is peanuts, because the fair price of -600/+450 is -471/+471 (this was mentioned two paragraphs up). In any case notice the gap between -600 and +450 is 150 cents yet the Bookmaker has just a 3.75% advantage here.
To test this out on another line set, let’s say the bookmaker has handicapped the favorite having a 55% chance of winning and wants to add the same 3.75% advantage. The math is .55×1.0375=57.06% and .45×1.0375=46.69%. Using the implied probability field of our odds converter we see this gives us moneylines of -133 and +114 here the bookmaker is likely to round again to -135 / +115. His advantage is still in the 3.75% range of the previous example, yet the gap here is 20 cents instead of 150 cents. Hopefully you’re now seeing why moneylines cannot be averaged to remove juice.
How to Remove Juice from Moneylines
No Juice Betting
Juice Betting Terms
To remove the juice from moneylines the first step is to convert the betting odds to implied probabilities using risk/return=implied probability. For a moneyline of -600, if a bettor risks $600 they win $100 and therefore the return is $700 ($600 stake + $100 win). So here the math is 600/700=0.8571 (85.71%). If the opponent’s moneyline is +450 and a bettor risks $100 it is to win $450 and therefore the return is $550 ($100 stake + $450 win) so the math is 100/550=0.1818 (18.18%). Now note that implied probability represent how often you need to win on average to break even, and here 85.71% + 18.18% = 103.89%. The reasons the probabilities total greater than 100% is because of the bookmaker advantage called juice or vig. To remove this we need to divide each implied probability by the overall percent market (in this case 103.89%). So 85.71/103.89=82.5% and 18.18/103.89=17.5%, you see these now total 100% so the vig is removed. We now know the no-vig win probability of -600 / +450 is 82.5% and 12.5%. You can save doing out this math by using the tool at the top of our article. Perhaps I’ll write another article in the future on converting these percentages to American odds format, but for now you can enter them into our odds converter tool under the implied probability field to solve the answer is -471/+471.
Best Use of this Knowledge
Now that you understand a bit more about moneylines, you can use this information to “handicap the market”. Although they don’t openly accept US players, it is well known Pinnacle Sports offers the highest betting limits and fastest payouts while operating on the lowest margins. For NFL football games point spreads are priced -104 instead of the usual -110, and Pinnacle accepts massive wagers on these ($30,000 and $100,000 per bet limits in some cases). A good idea is to watch their website and compare their prices on moneylines, totals and point spreads to other sites such as www.bookmaker.eu (which accepts US players). If at any time you find a line better at Bookmaker or another site than is offered at Pinnacle you might have a smart bet. The next step would be to return to this page and calculate Pinnacle’s No-Vig price. If the odds you’re getting are better than Pinnacle’s no-vig price chances are you have a +EV (positive expected value) wager.
- Asian Bookies
- US Betting Sites
- UK Bookmakers
- NBA Betting
- F1 Betting Guide
- MLB Betting Guide