Sports betting odds come in different formats and it can be tricky to work out your potential winnings in each case. Our calculator enables you to convert American, Fractional and Decimal odds. Simply insert your wager and odds and it quickly calculates the payout for your bets.
Using a sports betting odds calculator makes working out how much you could win much easier. Odds can be tricky to understand at first glance with different formats, many bet types and varying prices at different sportsbooks.
As the odds offered by a betting site are directly related to the probability of a certain outcome, using our calculator will give you a clearer picture of whether a wager is worth it. A sports betting calculator removes the chances of making an error - after all, not many of us are math gurus - and it saves time if you’re comparing odds on the top New York betting apps, while giving you a clearer picture on finding the sweet spot between risk and reward.
All of the biggest US sportsbooks display betting markets in American odds but for some bettors that can be confusing. Just what do all of those positive and negative numbers mean? It might be that you work out the value of a wager easier in decimal or fractional formats - and that’s where using an odds calculator makes sports betting that bit simpler.
A moneyline bet is the easiest type to understand. It’s a wager that has two or three potential outcomes. That will mainly be who will win but in some sports, such as soccer, MMA and boxing, also whether the event will end in a tie. There are no other conditions attached to a moneyline bet like there are for points spreads and totals.
Moneyline odds in the American format will show the favorite with a minus (-) sign and the underdog with a plus (+). For example, the NY Yankees were recently strongly tipped to beat the Baltimore Orioles and were displayed at -230 to win with the dogs at +195. That means you’d have to wager $230 to return $100 in profit on the Yankees. A bet on the Orioles of $100 would land a payout of $295 (stake + profit).
Using the betting calculator on the above example gives you a better understanding. Most of us won’t be thinking of wagering exactly that $230. So, if we pop the more regular stake amount of $100 into the tool, it tells us we’d profit $43.48, plus gives us decimal odds of 1.4348 and fractional odds of 20/23. It also indicates the implied probability of a Yankees victory and at nearly 70% that will reassure us that the sportsbook rates their chances as high as we might.
It’s also worth noting that if a book can’t identify a favorite and an underdog, it will list both sides on the moneyline at equal odds. That happened in the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament with Oklahoma and Missouri both listed at -110 on the straight moneyline.
Parlay betting is where betting calculators become invaluable. With multiple lines betting, it would take some brain power to manually work out the total odds on a big parlay. If you want to give it a go though, you’d convert all of your American odds to decimal ones, multiply them all together, multiply that value by your stake amount, and then subtract the bet amount like in the following example.
Say you’ve selected three point spreads to add to a parlay, each with odds of -110, this is how the calculation works:
American odds of -110 = decimal odds of 1.91.
1.91 x 1.91 x 1.91 = 6.97
6.97 x 100 = 697
697 - 100 = 597
That tells you that your parlay will have American odds of +597. A winning wager of $100 will return a profit of $597.
Also, you know that parlays become riskier with less chance of a win the bigger they get, but do you realize by how much? The following list gives an overview, again with parlays made up with standard odds of -110 and their percentage probability of success:
|
Parlay Type |
Probability of Success |
|
Two-team parlay |
27.47 % |
|
Three-team parlay |
14.37% |
|
Four-team parlay |
7.52% |
|
Five-team parlay |
3.94% |
|
Six-team parlay |
2.06% |
|
Seven-team parlay |
1.08% |
|
Eight-team parlay |
0.56% |
|
Nine-team parlay |
0.30% |
|
Ten-team parlay |
0.15% |
It’s always useful to use a sports betting odds calculator to quickly see what some selections of heavy favorites might pay out. If some of your picks are priced very low, you might decide that the risk of one of them failing a whole parlay just isn’t worth the moderate returns it would produce.
Totals or under/over betting brings a different dimension to sports betting. This type of wager most commonly sees the sportsbook set a certain points figure that a game’s combined score will either be over or under. However, there could be other under/over markets available such as how many times a quarterback will throw a pass resulting in a touchdown or how many minutes of cage time there will be in a UFC fight.
If the totals betting line is sharp - that is, high amounts of money staked have moved it to a closing line influenced heavily by what the market expects - there should be around a 50/50 chance of winning an over/under bet.
The odds will usually be -110 on both sides but they can shift. This will be the case if the market hasn’t ‘liked’ one side sufficiently for the total to move so the sportsbook changes the odds instead. Here you might get -120 on the over and +100 on the over. You probably won’t need to use our betting calculator here to see that you’d get $12 for every $10 on this one for going under and an evens return on the over.
That said, if you’re bundling several over/unders together in a parlay, then using our betting calculator to understand what the payout would look like becomes essential.
Live betting odds can be crazy but that’s what makes them fun. Live betting means placing wagers as the play unfolds. Monitoring in-play odds can reap high rewards. Alternatively, your bet can burn out within moments of it being placed if something significant happens in the game.
Say you’d noticed that a spread stands at +2.5 for the NY Giants and -2.5 for the NE Patriots the morning of the game. Before the match, the Patriots need to win by three points to cover the spread. After five minutes of play though, the Patriots score a touchdown and the Giants haven’t done a thing yet. At this point, the spread might move dramatically to -9 on the Patriots and +9 on the Giants. The line has shrunk in favor of the underdog. If you’re an ardent Giants fan and rate their chances of a comeback, then that’s the time to move in.
It can also be productive to keep track of the in-play moneyline odds. In the biggest Super Bowl comeback of them all, during edition LI, towards the end of the game, the score stood at 28-9 in favor of the Atlanta Falcons against the New England Patriots. At this point, a bunch of fans in New England wagered with their hearts on the Patriots at a massive +1600. And so those bettors won big time as the Patriots eventually emerged victorious in a breathtaking overtime period that ended at 34-28
Futures betting odds are those prices offered on long-term bets. Futures could be who will win the Stanley Cup, the AFC East or the Masters. Futures are not just the outcome of a league or a cup either. It could be will Patrick Mahomes win the NFL MVP or will Will Alhorford get the most rebounds in the NBA season?
Futures odds are frequently generous and can be the best way for recreational sports fans to win big. At one point, a few weeks ahead of the NFL 2022/23 season, the Buffalo Bills were favorites to be champions at +300 followed by the Kansas City Chiefs on +600 to win the AFC East. Meanwhile, you could get a great value of +850 on both of those teams eventually facing each other in the Conference Final. Those kinds of odds just aren’t on offer for favorites in other bet types such as point spreads and totals. That means, say you only place one or two big wagers a year, futures make sense. Using the bet calculator, we can see that a potential Bills vs Chiefs final would hand a $4,250 profit off a stake of $500.
Prop bets - that is a wager on something occurring in a game or by a player not necessarily linked to the result - often have quite different odds than the standard ones seen on point spreads and totals. That means using our betting calculator or prop bets is very useful.
For example, with five games to go in the 2022 MLS season, New York City FC traveled to take on CF Montreal. At that point, the average first goal scored by each club was 26 minutes for NYCFC and 19 minutes for CFM. A prop on that game for the first goal to go in between 16 and 30 minutes had odds of or for NYFC to register in the opening half of -126. Those odds don’t lend themselves to quick mental math so our calculator is your best option.
Points spread betting is the most popular wager type in the US. For point spread bets, the oddsmaker moves a line so that the underdog gets an advantage and the favorite a handicap in how the scoring will pan out. Point spreads make almost every game a bettable one because without the balancing effect a straight moneyline would be too unattractive to consider.
Remember the awful Jacksonville Jaguars team of 2013? Going into a game against the Denver Broncos they’d only averaged 10.2 points a game against their opponent's 46. The bookmakers gave the Jags no chance and set the spread with the Broncos as the -28 point favorite. That remains the biggest spread in modern football history. In the end, the Broncos won 35-19 in a tougher than expected encounter and failed to cover with only the most faithful Jags fans earning a profit on the spread.
When reading point spread markets and calculating payouts, the line can move both in the odds and the spread. Typically, they’ll start with odds of -110 on both sides. A spread doesn’t tend to reach odds of -120, so once it reaches -115 the next move by the sportsbook will usually be to change the spread by a half point or full point.
An example would be the NY Giants opening at +9 with -110 odds, then getting a lot of action and moving to -115 at +9, before then shifting to +8 at -110. Using our betting calculator demonstrates what these differences do to the potential payouts as you monitor the line.
Betting odds are applied to any event that a sportsbook is taking wagers on. The odds are a reflection of the oddsmaker’s prediction on what will happen but with other factors baked in. This includes the overall implied probability plus the sportsbook’s cut for handling bets (the ‘juice’ or ‘vigorish’). There’s also an element of the bookmaker manipulating the price offered to make them more or less appealing to bettors.
The simplest way to work out how odds look is to use a sports betting calculator. This will reflect your selection’s chances of being successful and how much you stand to win if it hits. Alternatively, an odds table such as the one below displays how the most common appear in different formats along with their implied probability (which we’ll discuss in more detail later):
|
Fractional Odds |
Decimal Odds |
American Odds |
Implied Probability |
|
1/5 |
1.20 |
-500 |
83.3% |
|
2/9 |
1.22 |
-450 |
81.8% |
|
1/4 |
1.25 |
-400 |
80% |
|
2/7 |
1.29 |
-350 |
77.8% |
|
3/10 |
1.30 |
-333.3 |
76.9% |
|
1/3 |
1.33 |
-300 |
75% |
|
4/11 |
1.36 |
-275 |
73.3% |
|
4/9 |
1.44 |
-225 |
69.2% |
|
5/4 |
2.25 |
125 |
44.4% |
|
11/8 |
2.38 |
137.5 |
42.1% |
|
9/1 |
10.00 |
900 |
10% |
|
10/1 |
11.00 |
1000 |
9.1% |
|
20/1 |
21.00 |
2000 |
4.8% |
|
50/1 |
51.00 |
5000 |
2% |
|
100/1 |
101.00 |
10000 |
1% |
|
1000/1 |
1001.00 |
100000 |
0.1% |
American odds are the default format for US sportsbooks, and the type of odds you’ll encounter most often. It’s important to understand that American odds are based around a bet amount of $100. They’re worked out in two different ways depending if we’re backing a favorite or an underdog. Favorites have a minus sign ‘-’ before a numerical figure. Underdogs have a plus sign(+) in front of the digits.
If we were betting on the New York Mets at +140 versus the San Diego Padres at -165 we know that the latter are the favorites. A bet of $165 would be required to win $100 on the Padres with the original $165 also returned. If we back the Mets with $100, we’d get $140 plus the bet amount paid out.
Decimal odds are probably the simplest to use. They’re most often found at Asian, Australian and European sportsbooks. A decimal odds figure represents the amount you’d be paid out for every $1 wagered.
The decimal odds on the Mets and Padres example above would be 2.40 and 1.61. So if we bet $100 on the Mets and they win, we’d receive 2.40 x 100 = $240 in total with profit and stake together. A successful wager on the Padres gives us 1.61 x 100 = $161.
Fractional odds are mostly used by British and Irish bookmakers. The simplest fractional odds like 2/1 or 1/2 are straightforward to understand. So, for every $1 we wager at 2/1, we get $2 profit plus the stake. At 1/2, we receive $1 profit for every $2 wagered.
Fractional odds look more complicated for many markets though. For example, our -165 on the Padres converts to 20/33 in fractional odds. We can see easily that we’d get $20 profit for staking $33 but most of us don’t work in multiples of 33!
So, to work that one out further, the payout on a $10 bet is calculated by multiplying the stake by the top figure (the numerator) and dividing the result by the bottom number (the denominator) as follows:
(10 x 20) = 200, then (200/33) = $6.06
True odds and implied odds are two different ways of expressing probability. Implied odds are the way a sportsbook uses its pricing to display the implied probability. Bookies often set their odds somewhat lower than their actual estimation of what the outcome will be. This is so they can ‘hold’ a certain percentage as a straight margin.
In the above example, we can use our betting calculator to identify what the implied probability is for a Mets win (41.67%) and a Padres victory (62.26%). That totals to 103.93%. The 3.93%, in addition, is the vig, which is the sportsbook’s cut for facilitating your bet. True odds are those without the bookie’s take included.
A basic lore of betting is that if the implied probability is equal to or lower than true probability then the market has potential value and should be viewed as looking like it's a good bet to make.
Implied probability is worked out as follows.
For negative numbers, drop the minus sign and work out:
Negative Odds / (Negative Odds + 100) * 100
For positive numbers, it’s:
100 / (Positive Odds + 100) * 100
Here’s an example of what implied probabilities look like alongside their vig-free or true probabilities for just a few of the teams competing for the 2022/2023 NFL championship:
|
Team |
Odds |
Implied Probability |
True Probability |
|
Buffalo Bills |
+650 |
13.33% |
10.02% |
|
LA Chargers |
+1600 |
5.88% |
4.42% |
|
Denver Broncos |
+1800 |
5.26% |
3.96% |
|
NY Giants |
+12500 |
0.79% |
0.60% |
When you’re using our sports betting calculator to work out how much your potential winnings will be, it’s as simple as entering your intended bet amount and the odds. The software does the work so you can view how much profit you’ll make plus the total payout that also has your stake figure included.
