USDT sportsbook odds, and the margin inside them

The arithmetic is simple enough to do in your head after a few attempts, and almost nobody does it.

Step one: a price is a probability

Divide one by a decimal price and you have the probability the book is charging you for. A price of 2.00 is 50%. A price of 1.50 is 66.7%. A price of 4.00 is 25%. That is all an odds conversion is.

Step two: add the market up

Convert every outcome in the market and add the percentages together. A fair market would total 100%. A real one totals more, and the excess is the book's margin — the overround. A three-way football market totalling 105% is charging about five per cent; one totalling 112% is charging more than twice as much for the same event.

That number is directly comparable between operators, unlike almost anything else in this industry, and it is the single most useful thing to check before opening an account.

Where the margin is largest

• Headline markets on major events. Tightest prices, because everyone offers them and the competition is visible.
• Exotic and combination markets. Widest by a distance, because few people compare them and each leg compounds the margin.
• Accumulators. The margin applies once per leg, which is why a four-leg bet carries roughly four times the cut of a single.
• In-play. Wider than pre-match, and for a structural reason rather than a greedy one. Which one.

Editorial order; the networks column reports what each cashier publishes.

The rest of this section

• Football — the deepest market there is, and what that does to the price
• Esports — a young market with wide prices and unusual settlement rules
• Live betting — the one product where the delay between screens is the whole story
• Free bets — a free bet is not free money, and the difference is one word
• Settlement and payouts — unsettled bets, bonus balances, and what a payout waits for