Baseball Sucker Bet?

[Feltin Licter]

My book has "10 cent lines". Tight games -105 v -105

Are the big favorite games stupid to bet? Spreads get wide... -220 +180 Seems like a sucker line. Comments?

[FUpaymee]

Take the runlines on games where you are confident in one team but don't like all the chalk.

[craig r]

and your reasoning for this is....??

craig

[Dubious]

It does seem like a sucker bet. On the one hand, you're laying $105 to win $100, so if two people bet $105 on each side, the book takes in $210 and pays out $205 total to somebody and collects $5 for a profit of 5/210=2.4%.

However, in the case of 220 vs 180, if one person bets $206.25 on the favorite and the other bets $107.14 on the dog, the book collects $313.39 and pays out $300 (because 206.25+206.25/2.2=107.14+107.14*1.8=300, which is why I chose those numbers so it doesn't matter who wins). Thus, the profit is $13.39 which is 13.39/300=4.3% or almost twice the first bet.

The question is why doesn't the book move up to $20 lines (like -210 vs +190) on the big odds like most books do? This puts the profit back to 2.2% (by the same math as above) which is in line with the even lines. Maybe you just need a different book.