So you’re getting into sports betting. Perhaps you’ve signed up for whatever book your friends tipped you onto, or maybe you’re already a few books and are wondering how many more to add. Well, you’ve come to the right spot. Let’s dive into how many sportsbooks a bettor should have — the answer, as most answers usually are, is that it depends — but generally, yes, you should have multiple sportsbook accounts. If you’re hunting out more sports betting advice, check out our library of educational resources!
How Many Sportsbooks Should You Have?
Sports Betting 101: How Many Sportsbooks Should You Have?
Before I can answer the question of how many sportsbooks should you have, I need an answer from you: what are your goals with sports betting? If you’re hoping to have a good time and place crapshoot $5 parlays every few weeks, you probably don’t need to sign up for every sportsbook in your state.
If you’re seriously looking to make money from sports betting, you should sign up for as many books as possible. In doing so, you can take advantage of a litany of different promotional offers to help build your bankroll as you get started. Take a look at some of the most popular promotions in your state below:
Why You Should Have Multiple Sportsbooks
Sportsbooks will, by and large, offer the same markets. There are some exceptions: you can’t bet on unders for batter props in the MLB at FanDuel, for example. If you’re hoping to bet on spreads in the UFC, DraftKings is one of the few sites that offers such markets. But in general, most sportsbooks will offer the same things: point spreads, game totals, player props — you name it.
But while books will usually offer the same markets, they usually won’t offer bets for the same price. Let’s look at an example from our live odds screen to demonstrate this point. I’m using the odds from Game 5 of the series between the Philadelphia 76ers and New York Knicks:
As you can see, the Knicks’ moneyline was available across the market, but different books were charging different prices for it. DraftKings was the stingiest at -180 (64.3), while FanDuel was the most generous at -164 (62.1%). That gap may not seem that wide to you, but a difference of 2.2% can prove quite meaningful over the long term.
Think about it like this: you pull off the highway to refuel your car. You see an Exxon station offering gas for $3.50 a gallon and a Shell offering it for $3.40. What do you do?
You’re obviously pulling into the Shell station to fill up your tank even though that $0.10 per gallon isn’t all that much of a difference.
But bettors who are at just a few sportsbooks often cannot buy their chosen bet at the best price, forcing them to settle for either no action or the worse price. Again, while $0.10 per gallon may not make or break your savings account, you’ll begin to notice the difference pretty quickly if you have to fill up your tank twice per week.
But unlike gasoline, sports bets aren’t something you consume. They’re an investment that can make you money. So while all the money you put into your gas tank will come out the exhaust pine, the money you put into your sportsbook accounts can come out the other end — supplemented by plenty of winnings — if you play your cards right. That means the pricing disparities between sportsbooks is something you can use to your advantage.
Now that you know why you should have multiple sportsbooks, let’s talk about how to use the books to beat the books with Portfolio EV.
The below content is repurposed from our guide to using +EV betting tools.
How Does Portfolio EV Work?
Before we talk about how to use Portfolio EV, let’s talk about how it works. It indexes the odds from across the sports betting market, adjusts for hold, book sharpness and other factors, then generates a breakeven price called “true odds” against which all publicly available odds are compared.
When a wager is trading for longer odds than the true odds, we know that a bet is a +EV bet. How do we know this? The model is carefully backtested to ensure we have a positive return on investment. Again you can check out our results — or the results of our subscribers, some of which are included in this article.
While you can arrive at a +EV bet by other means, OddsShopper’s market-based approach is a great way to build your bankroll. It relies on the presupposition that some sportsbooks are sharper than others, especially Pinnacle, a high-limit, low-hold offshore book.
Because Pinnacle has higher limits and lower hold than domestic books, also called public books, they have more incentive to post more efficient odds. We can use their lines to beat public books, who often price up overs (and price down unders) in hopes of pocketing more money from public bettors.
How to Use Portfolio EV
Now let’s talk about how to use Portfolio EV. When you first sign up, you should navigate to the shop pages to see the best +EV bets today. It should look something like this:
You’ll find bets from a variety of sports and on a variety of markets. In this screenshot alone, we’ve got several NBA player prop bets, a few MLB player prop and home run bets, as well as a golf tournament matchup.
Our shop pages are customizable. You can change your state, which will lead to only wagers available to you rendering as +EV bets. You can customize your bankroll, which will change the recommended bet sizing. You can also filter by league, sportsbook, type of bet and when the game, match or tournament in question will occur
Next, let’s take a quick look at an example wager and how our product team describes each of the key terms.
Bet Size: The recommended bet size as a percentage of your bankroll. This metric is based on a fractional Kelly Criterion approach that leads to a reasonable balance of minimizing risk of ruin while maximizing potential reward.
EV: An abbreviation for “expected value,” this metric estimates the long-term profitability of a wager by taking into account the probabilities/payouts associated with each potential outcome.
xWin: The probability of winning the bet implied by the Sharp Sportsbook Algorithm true odds.
OS Rating: The OS rating provides a rating for each +EV bet. An OS rating above 20 signifies an exceptional bet. Ratings between 10 and 20 are highly favorable bets. Finally, a rating between 0 and 10 indicates a solid bet. We factor in the EV, expected win, bet size, and negative geometric drag to calculate this rating.
Hold: The synthetic hold across the entire market, which is the loss a bettor would sustain if he bet both sides of the market to win equal amounts. The larger the hold, the more difficult it is to beat that market.
Portfolio EV Sports Betting Tools & Tips
New to sports betting? OddsShopper’s selection of Betting 101 articles is here to help. We even have a parlay builder and our guide to parlay betting. Check out our guide to finding positive expected value (+EV), and you can unlock more +EV plays by signing up for Portfolio EV!
