Moneylines
A moneyline is a bet on who wins. There is no point spread, so the price does the work the spread would have done, and the price is where you win or lose this bet.
Two prices, one game
Every game has two prices. The favorite carries a minus: at -150 you risk $150 to win $100. The underdog carries a plus: at +130 you risk $100 to win $130.
Margin doesn't matter. Win by one or win by thirty and the bet pays the same, and lose by one and it loses, which is the whole appeal of the bet and, on a big favorite, the whole problem with it.
What the price is telling you
Every price is a percentage, and once you see it that way you stop reading moneylines as a guess about who's better and start reading them as a claim about how often. You get the percentage by dividing what you risk by what you get back in total. At -150 you risk 150 to get back 250, which is 60 percent. At +130 you risk 100 to get back 230, which is 43.5 percent.
Add them and you get 103.5. The extra 3.5 is the book's cut. Take it out and the book is saying the favorite wins about 58 times in 100.
So the question on any moneyline is plain: does this team win more often than the price says? If you think the -150 favorite wins 65 percent of the time, you have a bet. If you think it wins 55, you don't, however much you like the team. I'd turn every price into that percentage before I bet it, and I'd only bet when my number beats the book's.
The gap between the prices
The distance between the two prices is what you pay to play. A line of -150 and +130 is a 20-cent line. A line of -150 and +140 is a 10-cent line, a dime line, which is how baseball has traditionally been dealt. The narrower the gap, the less you are paying.
That gap also widens as the favorite gets bigger. At -300 you might see +240 coming back, and that is 60 cents (three times the 20-cent line, for a game with the same two outcomes).
Prices also differ from book to book, and on the moneyline they differ more than point spreads do. Finding +140 where another book has +130 is common, and that is $10 more on every $100 for no extra risk. I never bet a moneyline at the first book I opened.
Moneyline or point spread
The same game has both, and they are two views of one opinion. In the NFL a 3-point favorite is around -160 on the moneyline, and a 7-point favorite is around -320.
Where the choice really matters is the underdog. You can be right that a team keeps it close and still lose a moneyline bet on them. Close isn't a win. My rule is simple. If I think the underdog covers, I take the points; if I think it wins outright, I take the price.
When the board has a catch
In soccer there are three prices: home, draw, away. A draw beats both team bets, so if you bet a side and the game ends level, you lose.
Hockey is dealt both ways. A regulation-time line has the draw in it, while the ordinary moneyline includes overtime and the shootout, and the two look alike on the screen. Read the label.
Baseball has its own wrinkle. A moneyline can be tied to the listed starting pitchers, and if one is scratched the bet may be void.
Laying a big price
At -400 you need to win 80 percent of the time to break even. Four winners make you $400, and one loser takes it all back.
People get around the big price by parlaying two or three heavy favorites together, and it feels safer than it is. The book's cut compounds on a parlay, and heavy favorites lose more often than it feels like they should. I wouldn't lay -400 often, and I'd never stack three of them on one ticket and call it a sure thing.