In layman’s terms, you can think of juice (also known as “vig” or “vigorish”) as the tax that sportsbooks charge on each side of a bet.

When you buy a coffee at Starbucks the price on the menu says $1.99, but with tax you end up being charged over $2. Sportsbooks do something similar. Using the game below, if you bet $100 on the Colts -2.5 and that bet wins you only get $90 back. But, if that bet loses the sportsbook gets your full $100. Fair? Eh, maybe. Reality? Unfortunately.

Let's examine the bet below where the sportsbook is taking Vig/Juice.

You can see that both sides of this bet (a 2.5 point spread) have the same odds - the sportsbook is saying these outcomes have equal odds, but they're taking a tax on both sides. If the "true" odds of the outcome are 50% (or +100), you're getting paid as if the odds were 52.38%. This small difference is the Vig/Juice.

If two bettors wager $100 on each side of this Patriots/Colts game, no matter what the outcome is the sportsbook would make $10. Multiply that $10 across millions of bets and that is how sportsbooks make their money.

The most common juice you will see is -110 on each side, but that is not always the case.

Using this same Colts/Patriots game, let’s say that more money comes in on the Colts -2.5 but the book isn’t quite ready to change the spread to be -3 or higher. In that situation what the book will do is increase the odds on the Colts -2.5 side to -115 or even -120.

Now let's examine a different bet with slightly different odds. In this case, we're looking at Green Bay vs Baltimore, and the bet is a point spread.

In the game above you see an example of this. Instead of it being -110 on both sides, the Ravens +7 has been priced up to -115 while you can get the Packers down at -105. This is what it means when you hear people say the juice is towards the Ravens (in this case).

Different sportsbooks have different odds depending on how they receive money on each side. So, one of the valuable betting tools that OddsJam offers is they have lightning-fast updated odds on each book. So, no matter what, if you use OddsJam you will be getting the best odds/lines.

Fair warning, calculating juice contains some math. There is also a juice calculator on OddsJam to do this for you, but if you want to learn how to calculate the vig yourself please read on.

When it comes down to it, odds are essentially just the probability of each outcome occurring. The easiest example of this is flipping a coin has two outcomes, each at 50%. If you add up each side you get to 100%. But, because of the sportsbook tax (juice), you will see that adding up the probability of each side is actually greater than 100%.

First you should convert the odds into their implied probability using the formulas below:

*If the odds are negative*

*If the odds are positive*

Using the first example bet (Colts/Patriots) from earlier, where both sides of the bet were -110, we get 4.8% vig. How do we get there?

Bet 1 and Bet 2 both have the same calculation, since they both have -110 odds. This means both sides of the bet have the same implied probability. First we compute the implied probabilities, then we add them together, then we subtract 100% to retrieve the vig!

This also means that you would need to win a bet at -110 odds 52.4% of the time to break even, as opposed to 50%.

Unfortunately, yes. There is juice in every market. Some markets just have more juice than others.

Let's look at another example from the NFL.

In this bet, we can see the Patriots have +115 odds to win, and the Colts have -135 odds. We'll use this to calculate the juice on this moneyline market. That 20-point difference (between 135 and 115) is the most common juice you’ll see for moneyline plays.

Now let's convert this to their implied probabilities:

Adding those two outcomes together gets you to 103.96%. That means the juice for this moneyline market is 3.96%

The juice on player props tend to be higher than spread or moneyline bets, due to the wider variance of player prop bets.

Let's look at an example.

The screenshot above shows the rushing yards player prop for both Carson Wentz and Jonathan Taylor. As you can see instead of both sides being at -110, they are listed at -115.

This puts both sides at a 53.49% probability, which adds up to 106.98%. So, the vig for this market is 6.98%.

Unfortunately, futures tend to have the most juice of all the different betting markets.

That might seem counterintuitive when you look at futures odds and see such large amounts, but sportsbooks normally charge the most juice when it comes to futures.

The reality is that odds are just the sum of probabilities. So in a single game there are only two outcomes, but with futures odds there could be dozens. When you add up futures odds for the Super Bowl or NBA Champion it is normally well over 100%.

It is important to remove juice because when you do that you get to see the true probability or line that the market thinks.

Again, OddsJam offers a no-vig or “fair odds” calculator that does this for you, but please read below for the formula to remove juice.

Formula:

Let's make this concrete with the above moneyline betting example. We know the following:

Therefore, the calculation is...

Those two outcomes now add up to 100% and you now know what the “true” or “fair” probability is for each side. You can plug those probabilities into an odds converter to find the fair odds or no-vig line for this market to be -123.51/+123.51.

One way you can beat the juice on bets is to use parlays to your advantage. Any given week of the NFL you will see some massive odds for games and huge favorites. Taking any of those favorites straight up might seem daunting, especially when odds can be so high. But, what you can do is parlay some big moneyline favorites together to get more favorable odds.

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