What Is Vig (Juice) in Sports Betting?
How sportsbooks build a margin into every line, how to measure it, and how to strip it out to find fair odds.
Vig — short for vigorish, also called juice — is the margin a sportsbook builds into its odds. Books don't charge a visible fee; they shade both sides of a market so that, together, the implied probabilities add up to more than 100%.
A concrete example
A point spread at -110 / -110 looks symmetrical, but each side implies a 52.38% chance. Add them: 104.76%. That extra 4.76% is the overround; as a share of the money wagered it is a 4.55% hold.
overround = (Σ 1/decimal − 1) × 100 → 4.76% at -110/-110 hold = (1 − 1 / Σ 1/decimal) × 100 → 4.55% at -110/-110
What it costs you
At -110 you need to win 52.38% of bets just to break even. If you split a bet evenly across both sides of a -110 market you lose about 4.5 cents on every dollar wagered. Reduced-juice lines at -105 / -105 cut that to a 2.38% hold.
Removing the vig
To find fair odds, divide each implied probability by the total. For -200 / +170 that gives 64.29% and 35.71% — fair odds of -180 / +180, with a 3.57% hold removed. Fair prices are the starting point for finding +EV bets.
- Shop several books: the cheapest price on the same bet is the lowest-vig version of it.
- Parlays, props, and futures usually carry far more vig than a main spread.