There’s no doubt the public plays a huge role in the hold percentage of a sportsbook for a given game, card, weekend etc. When it comes to posting opening lines, though, oddsmakers are primarily concerned with professional bettors, who scan those early numbers in search of outliers before pouncing on them like jackals on unsuspecting prey.
It is that sequence of events that almost always precipitates a line move, as oddsmakers generally respect the ability of sharp bettors to get ahead of the market via the positions they take.
In contrast, sportsbooks have minimal respect for positions taken by the public, regardless of when public bettors get down on games. So what does that mean in the greater context of reverse line movement?
What is reverse line movement?
Reverse line movement occurs when a line moves in the opposite direction of the ticket count. To illustrate that, let’s say the Cavs open as 6-point favorites over the Celtics and were receiving 70 percent of the bets at the moment a line move to 5.5 takes place.
That would qualify as a reverse line move because while the ticket count would indicate the most likely adjustment would be UP to 6.5, the opposite takes place. Thus what appears on the surface as a counterintuitive adjustment is in fact an indicator that the sportsbook is showing deference to a sharp position on the Celtics.
Similarly, the adjustment could also result from the totality of a number of heavy Celtics bets that end up shifting the money balance and creating a higher liability for the book on the Boston side.
Recreational bettors can take advantage
The easiest way to monitor line movement and bet percentages is via Sports Insights’ live odds pages, which track the betting metrics of a handful of prominent offshore sportsbooks. While it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, monitoring those metrics and identifying reverse line moves when they happen represents the best way for recreational bettors to catch a glimpse of the flow of sharp money in close to real time.
More often than not, the public and professionals find themselves on opposite sides of a number, which is the easiest and most tangible explanation for why public bettors lose long term and pros win.
Hold percentage may be the only thing that matters to a sportsbook’s bottom line, but the informed opinions of sharp bettors represent the true market shapers.