• Betting with reduced juice clearly helps to achieve this. There’s another big advantage of using reduced juice betting sites too. You’ll typically be able to bet more. A traditional betting site might limit you to staking $1-2,000 on each wager.But the limits at a reduced juice betting site might be $5,000, $10,000 or possibly even higher.
• If you don’t remove the vig or juice, you won’t know what the sportsbook actually thinks is going to happen in the game. Calculating the vig on a betting line also helps you identify those bets that are simply overpriced. For more great articles on sport betting tactics and tips, check out our guide to the sharpest strategies in the business.

If you are just starting out in your sports betting adventure, you might have heard the terms “juice” or “vig” many times, but likely don't know what it means. Here we will explain what is juice (or what is vig) and how it all works in the sports betting world.

What is Juice? Juice Explained

Juice Sports Betting

Juice or “vig” is simply the percentage a sportsbook “charges” for offering odds on sports betting events.

The juice is a term that describes the commission charged by the sportsbook on a bet. So naturally, we would want to drive that commission cost down, hence reduced juice. A bettor wants to profit a minimum of $100 for every $100 bet placed. A goal of the sportsbook is.

As we all know, there are no membership fees to join and bet at a sportsbook and contrary to the popular belief, the sportsbooks don't make money from the people that lost their bets. Well, we should probably say that their goal is not to have losers betting, but have equal amounts on each side of the bet. Naturally, this is nearly impossible to achieve, so the sportsbooks do sometimes make money from people losing their bets and other times can get obliterated by winning bettors. But that's a topic of a different conversation.

Getting back on track to the “juice” and “vig”, which are two sports betting terms describing the exact same thing. The sportsbooks have built-in profit maker in the odds, which many bettors refer to as “juice” or vig, which is short for vigorish. The most simple way of explaining and understanding juice in betting is to think of it as a percentage of each bet the book charges the bettor, or if you are a poker player – look at it as a rake.

How Juice works? / How vig works?

With most betting lines, the juice is not really apparent, but you can spot it and understand it completely if you look at one popular betting option -the over/under bet. If you pick a sport and look at the over/under lines, let's say and NBA game, you will see something like:

Total 201.5 points
Over: -110
Under: -110

You know how the total bet works – the sportsbook selects the most likely total of the scores of each team and then offers odds on whether the actual score will be over or under that total. If the sportsbook's odds makers did their job, both over and under will have 50% chance of occurring. Yet if you look at the odds, you will see that they are not “even”, as one would expect, but -110, i.e. you have to bet $110 to win $100. Where did the extra $10 come from? Well, my friend, that's exactly what the juice is and how the vig works. The sportsbook tries to get even amount of money on each side of the bet, in this example case the over/under on the NBA game, and juices up the odds to make profit from both sides of the bet. If ten people bet to win $100 each on over (i.e. $110 wagered per bettor) and ten people bet to win $100 on under, in the end, the money will simply travel from one side to the other. But the sportsbook, thanks to the juice, will make cool $200 ($10 vig on every bet) fee for offering the odds. While it's not as easy to see the juice on most betting lines, know that it's always there.

Juice Betting Tips

Low Juice Sportsbooks

While every sportsbook will charge vig, or have juice in the odds, otherwise it would be one very risky and most likely, unprofitable operation, not all sportsbooks have the same juice in the odds. The industry standard among the top sportsbooks is the so-called dime line. You can read more about it in our betting glossary. And there are betting sites with extremely high juice, praying on unsuspecting recreational bettors, those should be avoided at all costs, no matter how little you may bet. There is no need to throw away your money and we will never have a high vig sportsbook listed among the sportsbooks we recommend.

On the other side, there are low juice sportsbooks, although not many of them, to be perfectly honest. One of the most popular and reputable low-juice sportsbook is 5Dimes, which has always offered low juice lines on all their betting markets and is The Low Juice Sportsbook for US players. Another trusted low juice sportsbook is Pinnacle, which unfortunately does not allow players from the USA to join and bet with them. Those two sportsbooks are a perfect example of low juice sportsbooks and you can visit them to compare odds with other betting sites to see examples of the vig we explained earlier.

<< Back to Betting Glossary

What Does Juice Mean In Sports Betting?
by Doc's Sports - 10/9/2014

The juice is the primary way that sportsbooks make money - the commission they take on bets. It is also commonly referred to as vigorish, or just vig.

We’ll use an example to see how the juice works. The standard price for a pointspread or total bet is -110. That means that you have to bet $110 to make a profit of $100 on both sides. Let’s say that $1,100 is bet on each team, and the underdog covers the spread. Bettors on the underdog will make a combined $1,000 in profit. Bettors on the favorite will lose their $1,100 in combined bets. The sportsbooks will use $1,000 of those $1,100 in losses to pay the winning bettors. Left over is $100. That’s the juice - the commission on the bets, and the profit for sportsbooks.

People assume that sportsbooks are trying to be smarter than bettors - out-handicapping them and winning more games to make their profit. That’s just not the case. It’s all about the juice for books - at least ideally. Just think about it - if the books can get approximately balanced amounts of action on both sides of a game then they can make a guaranteed profit no matter how the game turns out. That is far more attractive for them than having exposure to one side or the other and hoping for the best. Books, then, are in the business of getting balanced action - they are market makers. The reason that lines move is because either action is more tilted to one team than the other and the movement makes the underappreciated team more attractive, or because the books anticipate unbalanced action because of a development like an injury and they are moving to minimize the impact of the action. When linemakers set lines, then, they aren’t necessarily trying to figure out who is going to win the game and by how much. They are focused on how they think you and the rest of the bettors are going to perceive a game, and where they need to set the line to drive balanced action. The better you can understand that and all that it means, the stronger you will be as a bettor.

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What Is Reduced Juice Betting