Another betting basketball option (following on from German stuff)

[AussieVamp2]

Well, after talking about having better pointspreads at -125

how about worse ones at +110?

some Australian bookmakers will offer two lines, one is the 'line' which is your +5.5/-5.5

and one which some of them will call the 'points' where you get a better price, but less points - so in a Miami/Utah example at Sportodds, for example, we have

+5.5/-5.5 at around 1.90

and +3.5/-7.5 at 2.10 now, that is around 20 cents better for 2 points, so does not sound too bad, especially for those sharp types that know what all points are worth - doubt that www.sportodds.com.au is in that situation - in the past these had been set at 2.00 for things like the AFL etc., so by my calculations, worse off, but this one is interesting

[Shawn]

If there are any (real) old timers around perhaps they can elaborate, but the notion of "points in" was, I'm told, how the lines worked when the point-spread line was first popularised-- out of the Gym Club in Chicago in the mid 1940s. A typical football spread had a two point split, such as -4/+2 and each side paid even money.

Skeptical that bookies would fix games to land inbetween (OK sounds screwy but this is the city of the Black Sox -- and hey, more recently Northwestern, ha ha) bookies started switching to a juice system shortly after the 1950s began.

[AussieVamp2]

Shawn, I did read that in a book, yeah.

Just that these ones I noticed today were better than even money, which I had not seen before.