Fourth & Value · Learn

Understand the price before you bet.

Evergreen fundamentals: how sportsbooks set prices, what a bet really costs, and how to compare an opinion with the market. For dated game analysis, see the Blog.

Start here

Three reads, in order. Together they cover the core idea behind everything on this site: the price matters as much as the pick.

  1. Basics · 6 min

    How sportsbooks make money (and why we devig)

    What the vig is, why −110 on both sides adds up to 104.76%, and how to strip it out to get fair probabilities.

  2. Basics · 9 min

    Synthetic hold: the true price of any betting market

    Take the best price on each side across books and a 4.5% hold drops to about 3%. How to calculate it, and when it goes negative.

  3. Case study · 5 min

    The edge was the price

    A model disagreement shrank to almost nothing, while the same bet paid at one book and lost at another.

Guides

Concepts that don't expire with a game. Examples may come from a past slate; the idea still applies.

Case study · 5 min

The edge was the price

Why we shrink model projections toward the market, and why line shopping can matter more than the pick.

Tools

Calculators that run in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Calculator

Synthetic Hold Calculator

Enter each book's price on both sides of the same line. See every book's hold, the best price per side, the synthetic hold, consensus fair odds and the stake split when a market goes negative.

Betting Basics videos

Short narrated explainers, about two minutes each.