It's easy to understand because it's the watered down story they recite to tourists. But it's not real. One sharp will walk up and bet more than all of the weekend warriors have in the past 24 hours, making their 50/50 calculations moot. The real goal is to not have a bad line that sharps eat up.
That is correct. I worked as sportsbook supervisor at joints taking the largest action in town at the time. The balanced action 50/50 stuff is such garbage you only hear it from outsiders with a very simplistic conventional wisdom notion of how Las Vegas operates. When it shows up on message boards then you can basically discount anything else the poster says on the matter.
Very few games have a 50/50 split. The books have a decision one way or another. Often it is a very large decision. That's why some sportsbook managers go nuts in the back room while rooting in a game. Nick Bogdanovich at the Horseshoe used to kick our filing cabinet with hard shoed ferocity to such extreme it was dented everywhere and had to be replaced.
Naturally the industry wants to pretend that type of thing doesn't exist. The big shot managers only get interviewed prior to huge events if the public holds onto the mysterious aura of people who magically decipher the Holy Pointspread with glistening balanced action, smack to the dollar.
The truth, as I've posted many times, is a handful of top oddsmakers get together and use stolen respected power ratings to form a consensus power rating of their own, and then they apply also-stolen home field/court values atop that power rating indication to come up with an opening line. Then they send that recommended line out to the various sportsbooks. Most of those sportsbooks will merely throw that number up on the board, without any input of their own. But a few places will evaluate matters subjectively and "shade" the number slightly, i.e. moving it maybe a half point or a full point in the direction they favor, or their direction they think the money will show.
So instead of -5.5 in the Canes/Clemson game yesterday they might have used -6 or -6.5 if they favored Clemson. Often the number is shaded downward if the books feel it is an obscure game that will only draw wise guy money, or shaded upward if they think the public will be primarily involved. Public indeed favors the favorite more often than not, while underdogs are the typical choice of local sharps.
Then the joints sit back and see what happens. The last thing you want to do is panic and artificially create balanced action. That would mean ping ponging the line and placing yourself in far greater danger of being sided or middled. Since this process is repeated thousands of times per year there is no need for any specific game to be balanced. Over time the power rating/home field method does a wonderful job of splitting the action just closely enough, causing wise guys to pause.
The one thing you can't afford is a stream of games in which the opening line is so far out of bounds in relation to wise guy perception that you are plastered with limit bets right out of the shoot. You move the number and they don't care at all. They'll pound it again. And again. Under normal distribution you can't avoid that type of thing a few times per year. The bettors will be aware of something you are not aware of. But if it happens repeatedly then your oddsmakers are ******** up, for whatever reason.
As I've mentioned, that type of thing was much more prevalent before the explosion of the internet. The internet allows reliable power ratings to be viewed and stolen, or nowadays the books may pay a small fee. Prior to the internet the sportsbooks used homemade lines all the time. That was candy. Mistakes everywhere. I feel sorry for the younger guys who did not experience that type of advantage. I left town largely because the mistakes were not available anymore. Now I have taken my sports betting winnings and applied them primarily to the stock market, which is considerably more boring but at least the direction has been dependably positive lately. I have no idea what I'm doin in the stock market compared to sports investing, so I stick with index funds for the vast majority.
Here is the link of how the line is actually set. Not much conversation at all. They have the power ratings in front of them so everyone is looking at the same numbers. It takes perhaps 30 seconds per game. Nobody cares about matchups or series history or anything of the sort. The only variance between this link and what actually happens is that these guys knew their picture would be taken, so they dressed far less casually than normal:
The Making of the Line - Vegas Seven
