To simplify things further, there is another way of estimating your winnings with American odds. How to Calculate Your Winnings With American Odds For example, if you bet $50 with +120 odds, you would make $60 in profit, and recover your $50 if your wager is successful. Instead, if you bet different amounts, the same proportion of return would apply.

This doesn’t mean you always need to bet $100 or in multiples of $100.

American odds of +120 means that if you bet $100, you would make $120 in profit, and recover the $100 you invested.

When a team is the underdog, meaning not favored to win, or an outcome considered unlikely to happen, American odds will have a positive number, like +120.

If you win the bet, you would get $220 in total ($100 in profit, plus the $120 you invested)

In this case, -120 means that you need to bet $120 to win $100.

When a team is favored to win, or an outcome heavily favored to happen, American odds will have a negative number, for example, -120.

Here are critical concepts that you need to know to comprehend American odds fully: Understanding American Sports Betting Oddsįor new bettors, American odds can be initially hard to understand. If you reside in the United States and want to bet on sports events, it’s important that you understand how this odds format works as almost all American sportsbooks offer odds in this format. Going back to our earlier analogy, we see how these odds help us understand who is more likely to win a matchup. Negative American odds indicate that the team is the favorite to win a matchup, while the team with a plus sign (+) next to their odds is considered the underdog. On the other hand, bettors who believe the Warriors will win the game would need a $100 wager in order to win $110.

These odds indicate that bettors must wager $110 to potentially win $100 (or a resulting ratio of 11:10) if they favor the Celtics to win. To illustrate, consider a hypothetical matchup between the Boston Celtics and the Golden State Warriors, where a sportsbook assigns odds of -110 to the Celtics and sets the odds at +110 for the Warriors. These odds are expressed using a minus or plus sign attached to a number and usually just indicate how much you’d need to stake to win $100 (if the odds are positive) or how much you could possibly win from staking $100 (if the odds are negative).

“American Odds” is the term given to the odds format used by bookmakers offering sports betting services in the U.S. “Odds” are the numerical representation of the probability of an event occurring. To understand how American odds work, one must first grasp the concept of odds.

How to calculate odds sports betting