Easiest way to understand baseball betting lines?

Question

I have always found it difficult to read baseball betting lines, can you help me know, of an easiest way to understand baseball betting lines.

Answer 1

he easiest way to understand how money lines work is to imagine in every scenario that you are working with $100. It is especially simple when you are dealing with underdogs. In that case the money line is the profit you would receive on a winning bet of $100, If you bet $100 on a +120 underdog, then you would receive a total of $220 when you won - the $120 profit plus your initial $100 wager. If you are a horseplayer or you prefer to think of things in terms of odds, then converting from a positive money line to odds is very simple - you just have to move the decimal place over two spots. That +120 favorite, for example, could also be looked at as 1.2/1, or 6/5.

When you are dealing with a favorite, the easiest way to think of it is not that you are betting $100, but that you want to win $100. In that case the price then becomes what you would have to bet in order to earn your $100 profit. If the favorite is at a price of -120, then you would have to bet $120 to win $100, so your total return would be $220, of which $100 would be profit. On a -170 money line you would have to bet $170 to win $100, so the -170 team is perceived to be more likely to win than the -120 team. If you want to look at favorites in the same way as underdogs - betting $100 per game regardless of the odds, then figuring out the payout requires a bit of math, but it isn't difficult. You can figure out why it works if you want, but the simple trick is to divide -10000 by the moneyline price to get the payout. For example, -10000/-120 is 83.33, so a $100 bet on a -120 favorite would pay $83.33 if it were to win. From that you can figure out the payout if you bet a different amount than $100. Twenty dollars is one fifth of $100, so it would pay out one fifth of $83.33, or $16.67. A $300 bet would pay three times as much, or $250.