While I believe that every sportsbook’s opinion/lines should be considered when determining the fair value of a given bet, some sportsbooks are better at this than others are. In general, it is best to trust lines that are tight, have high limits, and aren’t overly sensitive to action. These are characteristics of a sportsbook that is confident in the lines that they set. We sought out to find the optimal weighting of each sportsbook in a given market when coming up with our fair market odds to use for Bettorodds, our new line shopping tool. The idea is if two books differ on a market that the one that is “wrong” will be bet into and move towards the book that is “right” and that by the time the game starts most books will be relatively uniform and settled at the right price. We looked at which books had other books move towards their prices and which books were the ones moving towards the others prices to determine which book’s prices should hold more weight. We divided this up by sport and type of wager. The results were pretty in line with expectations but a few things did jump out. Make sure to check out the sportsbook sign up links at the bottom of the article to take advantage of all of the sportsbooks promos and lines available to you.
MLB Main Markets (moneylines/ spreads/ totals):
Sportsbook/ Weight:
MLB Secondary Markets (mostly player props):
Sportsbook/Weight:
Writeup/Conclusions:
1. While the weights have grown a bit closer together, it is largely the same books being the sharper ones. The top books in each category’s weight went down. I suppose this is what you would expect as time goes on, the same books being the sharpest but other books not lagging quite as much with more data on the season out there.
2. EV bettors probably generalize too much when it comes to sharpness. Saying Fanduel is sharp for baseball for example is only partially true, yes they are the sharpest when it comes to secondary markets but they are not even top 5 when it comes to moneylines.
3. Circa comes in at number 1 for secondaries but they only have strikeouts and home runs. We intentionally left it off last time with so little data but now that we are deeper in the year we decided to include it.
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