Let’s say the sportsbook has a series of bets that are all +250. You think in reality that the bets should actually be +125 and that the bet is not as big of an underdog as the sportsbook thinks. This means that you think you deserve $125 for every $100 bet that wins but the sportsbook is going to pay $250. Even though you think that the bet is still supposed to lose, you should make this bet.

Had you initially bet $100 on the Mavericks, you would walk away with a profit of $90.91. Now, if you bet on the Mavericks, you will see a profit of only $76.92. On the other side of the bet, an earlier bet on the Magic would have paid you $105. Now that same $100 bet will get you $125 if the Magic win the game. Ideally, this will entice more people to bet on the Magic and the action on the Mavericks to slow down.

As we did with the underdogs, we need to figure out how much we will profit for each $1 that we wager. For underdogs, we divided the moneyline number by 100. For favorites, it is the exact opposite. We will take 100 and divide it by the money line number. So, for this example, we will take 100 and divide by 155 and get about $0.645 or about $0.65 in profit for every dollar that we bet.

What the sportsbook does to fix this is they "spot" the underdog team some points to make it fair. Obviously, these points aren't included in the actual score to determine who wins or loses the game, but they are calculated in to determine who "wins" the game in the sportsbook's eyes. If you ever played basketball as a kid against an older sibling or your dad, they would sometimes "spot" you some points to make it fairer. Let's say you were playing to 20 points, they might "spot" you 10 points to make it fairer. They would then have to score 20 points to win, but you would only have to score 10. This gives you a chance actually to win the game.