Line shopping: why one bet has many prices

Each sportsbook sets its own lines from its own risk. A book holding a lot of money on one side moves its price to attract the other. Books that copy a sharp market update at different speeds. Books with different customers shade popular teams by different amounts. The result is the same bet at several prices at once.

Take a bettor who places 500 bets a season at -110. Getting -105 instead lowers the break-even rate from 52.38% to 51.22%. Over 500 one-unit bets at a 52% win rate, -110 returns about 3.6 units lost, and -105 returns about 7.6 units won, with the same picks. The price changed the result.

Points matter even more near key numbers. In the NFL, many games land on margins of 3 and 7, so +3.5 instead of +3 turns a set of losses into pushes or wins. Half a point there is worth more than the same half point elsewhere.

Hold accounts at more than one book you can legally use, and check them all before every bet. Compare the full price, line and juice together: +3 at -120 and +2.5 at -105 are different bets, and one is not always better.

Move fast when you find an outlier. A price far from the rest of the market is often about to move. Expect books to limit accounts that only take their outlier prices, so the best price is not always one you can get in full.

We no longer run a standalone line-shop page; it was retired with the Strategy Lab redesign. Each game's full market board carries a book-by-book table instead: the latest price we collected from each book, one table per market, with the best price for each side highlighted.

The table shows the books our sources cover, which may not be the books available where you live. Each price is the latest we collected, not a live quote, so confirm it at the book before you bet. Book prices can change between our update and your click.

The easiest way to capture closing line value, or CLV, is to take a better price than most of the market is offering. If you bet the best available number and the market closes near the average, you beat the close by the gap between the best and the average. That does not require any view of the game.

It works the other way too. Betting at the worst book on the board gives up that gap on every bet, and it makes a good handicapper look ordinary over a season.

The gaps between books are usually largest where the markets are least efficient. Player props and small leagues often show wider differences between books than main-market NFL spreads. That is also where books limit stakes most quickly.

On moneylines, compare prices in implied probability, not in cents. A gap between +150 and +160 is worth 1.54 points of probability, and so is a gap between -150 and -160. Converting to probability puts every comparison on the same scale, whichever side of even money you are on.

Our picks are graded at the price they were posted, not the best price available at any book. If you can find a better number than the one we posted, your own results on the same picks should run ahead of our record. If you can only find worse, they will run behind.