When the Minnesota Vikings closed as 16½-point favorites over Washington last Thursday, it was the eighth time this season that one NFL team was favored by more than two touchdowns over another in the Vegas line, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com’s data. Is that a lot? Well, yes. The 2019 regular season isn’t even halfway over (Week […]
When the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook’s 2019-20 NBA championship odds first opened back in May, the Golden State Warriors were the early favorites to win this season’s title. At +175, the Warriors’ odds implied a 36 percent chance to win the championship — pretty high in absolute terms, but low relative to recent Warriors odds, […]
Vegas is notoriously hard to beat. But as the NFL season gets started Thursday, there’s some promise for gamblers in betting on projected team win totals. Half-win totals from 8.5 on down seem to be very solid bets to hit the over, even when accounting for the vigorish, or house margin. Money-line data is only […]
NFL training camps are opening this week, and even teams that finished last season in last place are full of hope. Since the NFL is so volatile, this isn’t merely summer optimism. In every year this decade except one (2014), at least one team has rebounded from a last-place finish in its division the previous […]
In most respects, this season’s NBA playoffs have been scintillating, with a first round for the ages, the not-so-silent protest of the Los Angeles Clippers, and the resurrection of Serge Ibaka, Oklahoma’s lord and savior. Despite all that unpredictability on and off the court, the oddsmakers in Vegas knew what was coming since nearly the […]