Noob Beats Vol. 1

I love sports.  I watch live games.  I read blogs, columns, and message boards.  I consume sports shows in the form of podcast television and radio.  I’ve always been a fervent consumer of sports and sports related media.  So, given my background, I’ve got a shocking admission: I’ve never liked gambling.  

Gambling always made me uncomfortable.  The thought of a direct loss of money because of a voluntary activity has always infringed on my naturally conservative nature.  With sports and gambling now so intertwined, a sports fan who doesn’t like gambling probably seems like a strange admission.  

However, it wasn’t so long ago that sports and gambling went to elaborate lengths to diffuse their relationship.  Back then, I wasn’t naïve enough to believe there wasn’t any sports-gambling connection, but the fact that I wasn’t really into gambling, especially gambling on sports, really didn’t impact my ravenous consumption of sports and sports related media.

Years ago, legalized sports gambling began to spread across the country slowly but surely in the form of sports books like FanDuel, Draft Kings and they brought a ton of advertising with them.  The advertising was impossible to miss, but I also noticed that a new type of vocabulary found its way into the articles I read and the shows I consumed.  I started to realize that I was often struggling to understand what some of these words and phrases meant.  Fast forward to the 2022 NFL football season, and I listened to a talk radio segment where I could not follow what the talking heads were discussing because of my lack of familiarity with sports gambling lingo.

My goal with this recurring column is to come out into the light and embrace my shame.  I will examine gambling vocabulary and concepts, starting with the most basic and then hopefully move into more complex ideas.  I hope to become a more conversational sports fan and, along the way, other readers can learn about sports gambling but let me take all the shame of ignorance.  

If you’ve been following sports and sports media for a while, I’m sure you probably remember when the massive advertising budgets of Draftkings and FanDuel was projectile disseminated upon the viewers, readers, and listeners of sports far and wide.  This experience was the first indication that things had changed. 

However, the next thing I noticed was all the “picks” segments.  Of course, there had been “picks” segments before where the host and a panel would pick the winners of the upcoming slate of contests.  But what I noticed as the guise of the steel curtain between sports and gambling started to dissolve, was the phrases “spread” and “money line.”  Now, in my defense, I was vaguely aware of what a point spread was but it hadn’t occurred to me how it could apply in a silly radio segment where folks were simply picking winners.

Money line seems like an overly complicated title for simply picking the team that wins the game.  And that definition, is actually an oversimplification.  The reason for that has to do with which team is most likely to win the game.  The sports book involved sets “odds” based on the quality of the teams.  Effectively, the more likely the team you picked was to win, the less money you’ll get from your bet and visa versa.  If you’re good at picking underdogs, money-line is a great way to go.

Money-line also appears to be a more desirable route for lower scoring sports like baseball, hockey and soccer.  This is because the point spreads don’t necessarily vary in accordance with dominance or team quality like they do in sports like football and basketball, and so the shifting odds of money line bets in low scoring sports can create more and more opportunity.

The funny little numbers next to the games often reflect the point spread, and that has been commonplace for some time.  This shows the point differential that the sports books have determined for the game.  However, large numbers often also appear next to the teams, and those numbers represent the odds for the money line bet.  For a noob like me, those numbers make little sense.  However, in my research, I learned that those numbers represent the odds for money line bets.  It works like this; the negative number shows how much you’d have to bet in order to win $100.  The positive number shows how much a better would profit if they bet $100.

For my next column, I do want to take another good look at the point spread, what it means and how it is being applied in sports media today.  As for this column, I am glad to finally know what the heck those large positive and negative numbers mean and I’m glad to know that I could now make the simplest type of bet there is in all of sports gambling.   I know most of you are saying, “hey, any idiot could do that.”  Well, it was tough for me, so back off!  (Thanks to Billy M. for the sign-off)