Baseball Betting Strategy: Dimelines Explained
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
In other forms of sports-betting, it’s easy to understand the juice. What is juice? It’s the gap that exists between the actual odds of something happening and the odds that the bookie is offering you. There is always going to be a difference, being that the bookie is not in business to facilitate our entertainment. They’re trying to make a buck and that means we literally have to pay for the privilege of betting.
In football, for example, the juice is easy to fathom when making straight bets. Whether we’re betting at -110 or -105, we see the juice is clearly spelled-out. We need to bet $105 or $110 for every $100 we hope to win. Easy. Major League betting, however, is a little different. They use the money line, rather than a spread. With a point-spread, either side theoretically has an equal chance of winning. In baseball, each team has a set of odds, as expressed by the money line.
Finding a dimeline, therefore, is key. Here is how it works. In baseball, each team is given a set of odds on the money line. A dime line makes it so there is only a 10-cent difference in the two sides. Most books, however, use a 20-cent line, meaning there is a 20 cent difference in the numbers. For a player who bets a lot of baseball, that little difference can add up to huge numbers over a long baseball season.
Here is an example of a dimeline in baseball betting:
Arizona Diamondbacks (+140) vs. San Francisco Giants (-150)
Arizona is the underdog and the Giants are the favorite. You can see that at +140 and -150, there is a dime difference between the favorite and the underdog. Look at the difference between a dime line and a 20-cent line:
Arizona Diamondbacks (+140) vs. San Francisco Giants (-160)
In the above example, the book uses a 20-cent line, which will move one team 10-cents more than it would be on a dime line. If you were taking Arizona in this example, there would no difference. But the dime-line makes San Francisco the better bargain at -150 than the -160 you would be getting on the 20-cent line. It can add up, so it’s important to not relinquish this edge.
ONLINE SPORTSBOOKS OFFERING DIMELINES: BETANYSPORTS
You will hear a lot of seasoned betting men say baseball is one of the easiest sports to beat in the betting world. But you can be sure these guys are not betting on a 20-cent line. When betting on a 10 cent line, the juice is negotiable, meaning you’re not getting buried with vig. It’s key to secure every edge at your disposal. When betting a 20-cent line, you are paying twice the juice. Not wise.
To make it easier to fathom how much you would save betting on a dime line as opposed to a 20-cent line, let’s say you are a medium-range bettor who plays two baseball games per day. Your bets revolve around the $100 mark, meaning you try to win $100 on favorites, while betting $100 on dogs. The dime line would theoretically give you a 10-cent break on half of your bets. With favorites, that means betting a dime more and with underdogs, it means winning a dime less.
Let’s say you are a break-even bettor who equally takes underdogs and favorites, just to make it easy. The math gets a little murky, but if you make an average of two baseball bets daily revolving around the $100 figure, a dimeline will save you over $300 per month. That’s like 2 grand over the entire baseball season! All for an edge you didn’t even to hunt down!
It’s important to take every edge we can, especially if it’s just being served up for us on a silver platter. As baseball bettors, we are like hounds, going around scrounging for every edge we can find. We handicap our tails off, think things through, and pour over information in an effort to strengthen our wagers and our overall position. When there is an edge available that doesn’t require any work on our part, we should go out of our way to take it.
