.png)
Vig is the commission a sportsbook charges on every bet you place. It's baked into the odds you see, which means you're paying it whether you notice or not. Vig is also called "vigorish" or "juice" — three names for the same thing, and it's the single biggest cost most bettors don't track.
At standard -110 odds, you risk $110 to win $100. The extra $10 is the vig: the sportsbook's cut for taking your action. Most bet trackers report whether you won or lost. Pikkit's BookSync pulls in every bet from every connected sportsbook (30+ supported) and the closing-line-value tool measures how much of the vig you actually paid by comparing your price to the market close on the same market. That's the real-world vig number, not a textbook average.
Sportsbooks don't itemize a fee on your bet slip. They bake their margin into the odds themselves.
Take a typical NFL spread where both sides are listed at -110. The sportsbook collects $110 from bettors on each side and pays out $100 to whichever side wins. The $10 gap is the vig, and it's there regardless of which team covers.
You can see it cleanly in implied probability. At -110, the implied probability of either side winning is 52.38%. If both sides are priced at -110, the combined implied probability across the two outcomes is 104.76%. That extra 4.76% above 100% is the sportsbook's built-in margin, also called the "hold" or "overround."
This is why a 50% win rate at -110 odds loses money long-term. To break even at -110, you need to clear 52.4%, and to actually profit, you need to beat that number consistently.
The price you get determines the win rate you need. Here's how common odds translate into break-even percentages:
The gap between -110 and -105 looks small on a single bet. Across 500 spread bets at $50 each, it's the difference between needing 262 wins to break even and needing 256. Six extra wins out of 500 is the whole margin between profitable and not. That's the leverage of paying less vig.
Spreads and totals usually sit around -110 on both sides, which works out to roughly 4.76% vig. Other bet types are different, and most are worse.
Moneylines on lopsided matchups. The bigger the favorite, the wider the implied-probability sum. A -300 / +220 moneyline implies a combined 106%, meaning 6% vig — noticeably steeper than a balanced -110 spread.
Player props and futures. Both run higher because they're harder for sportsbooks to price precisely. Prop vig commonly sits at 6-10%; long-shot futures (Super Bowl winner in July, MVP odds in October) can climb past 20% combined hold across the field.
Parlays. Every leg compounds the vig from the leg before it. A four-leg parlay built from -110 lines doesn't pay true odds (around +1,228); it pays roughly +1,150, with the difference being stacked vig. This is the structural reason parlays are so profitable for sportsbooks even when individual legs hit at expected rates.
Reduced juice books. A handful of sportsbooks (Pinnacle internationally, and a few US books on select markets) run -107 or -105 as their standard. Same bet, lower break-even.
You can't eliminate vig. You can compress how much of it you pay.
Line shop every bet. Different sportsbooks post different prices on the same market. Getting -108 instead of -115 drops your break-even from 53.5% to 51.9%. Pikkit's Autofill compares lines across your connected books and places the bet on the best price in one tap.
Best for: anyone with more than two sportsbooks connected. Watch for: tiny edges aren't worth the friction of opening a new account. Line shopping pays off when you have at least 3-4 books to compare across.
Bet at reduced-juice books when available. Some sportsbooks default to -105 on spreads and totals. The cost saving is automatic.
Be selective on props and parlays. Nothing wrong with betting them, but understand the vig structure. A prop bettor needs to hit a meaningfully higher win rate than a spread bettor to clear the same break-even bar.
Track your closing line value. CLV measures whether the price you got beat the closing line. Positive CLV across hundreds of bets means you're consistently buying lines before they harden, the cleanest leading indicator that you're paying less vig than the market average. Negative CLV is the inverse signal.
Same bet, same player, three different sportsbooks. Strikeout under 3.5 for a starting pitcher:
If you place this same bet three times at each book and go 2-1, the net profit looks very different:
Same record. Same bet. Nearly 3x the profit between the best and worst price. This is what vig looks like in practice over the course of a season.
Juice is another word for vig. When someone says "the juice is -110," they're referring to both the odds and the commission baked into them. "Vigorish," "vig," and "juice" all describe the same sportsbook margin.
Reduced juice means lower vig, typically -105 instead of -110 on spreads and totals. A few sportsbooks offer this as a standard feature. The break-even at -105 is 51.2% versus 52.4% at -110, which is a meaningful long-term edge.
Divide your risk by your total return at the given odds. At -110, that's 110 / 210 = 52.4%. At -120, it's 120 / 220 = 54.5%. Any win rate above your break-even number is profitable; anything below loses money over a large sample.
A -110 / -110 market gives the sportsbook a 4.76% hold, which is historically the rate at which they can balance action on both sides while still making a reliable profit. It's the equilibrium price for a balanced two-sided market, and it's been the convention in US sportsbooks for decades.
The -110 standard is common across most US sports for spreads and totals. Vig on moneylines, props, and futures varies by market and by how confident the sportsbook is in its pricing. Less-liquid markets carry more vig because the book is exposed to more pricing risk.
No, but you can sidestep the traditional vig model. A growing set of US platforms don't bake vig into the odds: peer-to-peer betting exchanges like ProphetX and Novig, where you match against other bettors instead of the house; sports trading exchanges like Sporttrade, where you buy and sell positions at the market price the way you'd trade a stock; and event-contract platforms like Kalshi, where sports outcomes trade as yes/no contracts. Each charges a flat commission on winnings rather than pricing vig into the lines. You can also reduce effective vig at traditional sportsbooks through promotions: bonus bets, profit boosts, or no-vig markets offered on specific events.
Compare the odds you placed at to the closing line on the same market. Across hundreds of bets, the gap between your average price and the closing price is the effective vig you paid. Pikkit's bet tracker calculates this automatically by recording every bet through BookSync and computing per-bet closing line value, so you can see which of your sportsbooks is costing you the most and which is offering the sharpest prices.
Understanding vig is step one. Knowing whether you're actually beating it is what matters. Pikkit's bet tracker calculates your win rate, ROI, and CLV across every connected sportsbook through BookSync, so you can see exactly how much vig you're paying and which of your books is costing you the most.
Download Pikkit to track your bets across every sportsbook automatically. Free on iOS and Android.
