Juice in Sports Betting: What It Is, How to Calculate It, and More
Written by: Eddie Griffin
Published: Mon Mar 17, 2025, 10:09 AM
Read Time: 11 minutes
For sports bettors seeking consistent success, understanding the concept of juice is essential.
Juice, also known as vig or vigorish, represents the commission that sportsbooks charge for accepting your wagers. It is effectively the built-in advantage that ensures bookmakers can operate profitably regardless of game outcomes.
Think of juice as the cost of doing business in the sports betting world. It is the price you pay for the opportunity to place your bets.
While casual bettors often overlook juice, sharp bettors recognize it as a critical factor that significantly impacts long-term profitability. The difference between paying standard juice and finding reduced juice opportunities can be the determining factor between being a winning or losing bettor over time.
Properly understanding and accounting for juice can be beneficial to bettors of all interest and experience levels. By using this guide to enhance your knowledge of juice, you will be equipped to become a better and more successful bettor.
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What Is Juice in Sports Betting?
Juice is fundamentally the sportsbook’s commission built into the odds of any bet you place. This commission ensures that bookmakers make money regardless of the outcome of sporting events.
Without juice, sportsbooks would operate at a significant risk, essentially making even-money bets with customers. By building in this house edge, bookmakers create a buffer that allows them to remain profitable over time while still paying out winners. This is similar to the built-in house edge in blackjack and other games at online and land-based casinos.
The most common example of juice appears in point spread betting, where standard odds are typically set at -110 on both sides of a wager. This means you need to bet $110 to win $100, with the extra $10 representing the juice.
If a sportsbook accepts equal action on both sides of a point spread bet, they’ll pay out $100 to the winners while collecting $110 from the losers. This guarantees themselves a $10 profit regardless of the game’s outcome.
Juice is not limited to point spread betting. It exists in all betting markets, though it may be less obvious in moneyline betting, over/under betting, or prop bets.
In moneyline betting, juice is built into the difference between what you risk on favorites and what you win on underdogs. For example, if a favorite is listed at -150 and the underdog at +130, the 20-point gap between these values represents the sportsbook’s edge.
How to Calculate Juice in Sports Betting
Understanding how to calculate juice allows you to identify the true implied probability of bets and find better value.
The most straightforward way to calculate juice is to convert odds to implied probabilities and see how much they exceed 100%, which represents the bookmaker’s edge.
For a standard -110/-110 point spread bet, we can calculate the implied probability using the formula: [Odds/(Odds + 100)] × 100 for negative odds. So, -110 odds convert to [110/(110 + 100)] × 100 = 52.38% implied probability. Since both sides have 52.38% probability, the total is 104.76%, meaning the juice is 4.76%.
For moneyline bets, the calculation follows the same principle. If Team A is -150 and Team B is +130, Team A’s implied probability is 60% [150/(150 + 100)] × 100, while Team B’s is 43.48% [100/(130 + 100)] × 100. The total implied probability is 103.48%, making the juice 3.48%.
How Does Juice Impact Your Betting Profitability?
Juice has profound implications for your long-term betting success. To be profitable at standard -110 odds, you need to win more than 52.38% of your bets just to break even.
This means a bettor who wins exactly 50% of their bets will slowly but surely lose money over time—a crucial concept that many novice bettors fail to grasp.
The mathematics reveal a sobering reality: at -110 odds, you need to win approximately 53% of your bets to generate a profit. While this may not sound challenging, consistently achieving a 53% win rate against the spread is extremely difficult. Professional handicappers typically consider a 55-56% win rate to be exceptional.
To illustrate this impact, consider a bettor who places 1,000 bets of $100 each at -110 odds. If they win exactly 50% of these bets (500 wins, 500 losses), they’ll win $45,455 from their victorious wagers while losing $50,000 on their unsuccessful bets—resulting in a net loss of $4,545, or about 4.5% of their total amount wagered.
Of course, in real world practice, having some level of success with betting on plus odds (whether with underdogs or on run line bets, puck line bets, or other bets such as futures bets), having funds or free bets from sportsbook bonuses, or redeeming perks from sportsbook rewards programs can help you come away with a profit even if you do no better than 50%. But this example underscores just how difficult it is to turn a profit as a sports bettor and why so many are unable to do so.
This is part of why it is wise to tread carefully when choosing where to buy premium sports picks, as many handicappers and handicapping services are not as transparent as they should be about their records and losses.
Line Shopping: Reducing Juice for Better Value
Line shopping—comparing odds across multiple sportsbooks to find the best prices—is one of the most effective ways to combat juice.
Even small differences in odds can significantly impact your long-term profitability. Finding -105 odds instead of -110 reduces the break-even point from 52.38% to 51.22%, a seemingly small difference that translates to substantial savings over hundreds or thousands of bets.
Professional bettors often maintain accounts at numerous sportsbooks specifically to take advantage of these line disparities. They understand that consistently finding the best odds available might boost their return on investment by 1-2%, which can mean the difference between profitability and losses.
Consider this example: If you bet $100 on 100 games at -110 odds with a 53% win rate, you’d profit approximately $265. If you found -105 odds for those same bets, your profit would increase to roughly $765. In this instance, you would receive nearly triple the return simply by reducing the juice you pay.
Reduced Juice and Dime Lines
Some of the best online sportsbooks differentiate themselves by offering “reduced juice” or “dime lines,” especially with MLB betting and NHL betting.
A dime line means the difference between the favorite and underdog is 10 cents (for example, -140/+130), as opposed to a 20-cent line (-140/+120). Betting at sportsbooks that offer these more favorable odds structures can significantly reduce the juice you pay over time.
Those who bet on MLB odds particularly benefit from dime lines, as they typically place more wagers throughout a season than bettors in other sports due to the higher number of games. A bettor who places 1,000 MLB bets per season might save thousands of dollars annually simply by using a sportsbook that offers dime lines rather than 20-cent lines.
Even without access to specialized reduced-juice sportsbooks, understanding line movement in sports betting can help you minimize the juice you pay. Betting early in the week before lines move, or waiting for reverse line movement in certain situations, can often secure you better odds and effectively reduce your juice payment.
Middling: An Advanced Strategy to Beat the Juice
Middling is an advanced betting strategy that takes advantage of line movement to potentially win multiple bets on the same game.
While not directly reducing juice, middling creates scenarios where bettors can win both sides of a bet. That effectively negates the juice entirely and creates pure profit opportunities.
This strategy involves placing a bet on one side of a point spread, then betting the other side if the line moves significantly. For example, if you bet the underdog at +7.5 and the line later moves to +3.5, you could then bet the favorite at -3.5. If the game lands on a margin of victory of 4, 5, 6, or 7 points, you will win both bets.
While middling opportunities are not common, they represent one of the few situations where bettors can completely neutralize the bookmaker’s edge. Professional bettors constantly monitor line movements across multiple sportsbooks to identify these potential middle situations, particularly with betting on NFL odds and college football odds.
Juice in Different Betting Markets
The amount of juice varies considerably across different betting markets and sports. Understanding these variations can help you focus your betting activity on the markets with the lowest house edge:
Point spread bets and total bets (over/under bets) typically feature standard -110 juice on both sides, representing a 4.76% house edge. However, these numbers can shift based on betting activity, sometimes reaching -115 or higher if one side receives lopsided action.
Moneyline betting features variable juice depending on the matchup. Close contests might have just 3-4% juice. Mismatches can have significantly higher juice, often hidden in the gap between the favorite and underdog odds.
Prop bets and futures bets generally have the highest juice, sometimes exceeding 15-20%. The increased juice reflects both the difficulty in setting accurate lines for these markets, as well as the recreational nature of many prop bettors. For example, Super Bowl player props often attract a lot of interest from casual bettors who don’t bet on a frequent basis outside of their Super Bowl betting.
Live betting typically features higher juice than pre-game betting due to the need for bookmakers to protect themselves against information advantages and the rapid pace of odds adjustments.
Conclusion
Juice represents an unavoidable cost for sports bettors, but understanding its impact allows you to make more informed decisions that maximize your long-term profitability.
By being able to calculate the true implied probabilities of your bets, recognizing the break-even win percentage needed to profit, and consistently seeking the best available odds, you can significantly reduce the juice you pay.
The most successful bettors view juice not as an afterthought but as a central consideration in their betting strategy. They recognize that even small reductions in juice, when applied across hundreds or thousands of bets, can dramatically improve their bottom line. In a pursuit where margins are often razor-thin, paying attention to nuances such as juice can be the decisive factor that separates winning bettors from losing ones.
If you bet on sports frequently or wish to do so, developing a strategy to minimize juice should be essential. Whether through line shopping, focusing on low-juice markets, or seeking out reduced-juice opportunities, your approach to handling the bookmaker’s commission will be crucial to your long-term success.
Learn More About Sports Betting
This guide features information that will serve sports betting beginners well, but it is just one of many guides we have for both new and experienced bettors.
Whether you want to learn about over/under bets, prop bets, and other types of bets, sportsbook bonuses, notable sports betting terms and phrases, or sports betting strategies such as hedging and middling, we have you covered.
Do you love to play online slots, blackjack, roulette, and other popular online casino games? Check out our catalog of casino guides and learn all you need to know to play your favorite games at the best online casinos.
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Juice in Sports Betting FAQ
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