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What each market actually prices, where the margin sits, and which ones are worse than they look.
Reading a price
Canadian books usually display decimal odds. A price of 2.50 returns two and a half times the stake, including the stake itself. Convert it to implied probability by dividing one by the price: 1 / 2.50 = 0.40, so 40 per cent.
Do that for both sides of a two-way market and the two percentages will add up to more than one hundred. A pair of 1.90s implies 52.6 per cent each, or 105.3 per cent in total. The 5.3 points above one hundred are the margin: the operator’s cut, built into the price rather than charged as a fee.
Margin is the single most useful number in betting because it applies to every bet you place, forever, regardless of whether you are any good at picking. A market at 102 per cent and a market at 112 per cent are the same bet at very different long-run costs.
The ones worth learning first
Moneyline
Pick the winner, nothing else. Two-way in hockey, basketball, football and tennis; three-way in soccer where a draw is its own outcome. The simplest market and usually the tightest-priced.
Spread / handicap
One side gets a head start. Designed to bring both prices near even money, which makes it the standard market in football and basketball. Half-point lines exist to remove the push.
Totals
Over or under a combined score. Prices the pace of a game rather than its winner, which is a genuinely different question and often an easier one to have an opinion about.
Asian handicap
Removes the draw by splitting stakes across two lines. A quarter-ball line means half your stake sits on each side. Lower margin than three-way soccer markets, and worth the ten minutes it takes to learn.
Double chance
Covers two of the three soccer outcomes. Safer, and priced accordingly: you are paying for the reduced risk, and the margin on this market is usually wider than on the straight three-way.
Draw no bet
Stake returned if the match is drawn. The same idea as double chance, expressed differently, and generally the better-priced of the two.
Props, futures and multiples
Player props. Points, shots, goals, receptions, cards. Margins here are noticeably wider than on main markets because the books have less data and more uncertainty, and they price that uncertainty into the spread. Interesting, more expensive.
Team props. First to score, both teams to score, race to a number. Usually derivatives of the main markets with a wider cut.
Futures. League winners, division titles, awards. Your money is committed for months, the implied probabilities on a twenty-team market routinely sum to 120 per cent or more, and you cannot use that money for anything else in the meantime. The cost of a futures bet is larger than the price suggests.
Multiples. Combine legs and the odds multiply, but so does the margin. Four legs at 105 per cent each compound to roughly 122 per cent against you. The payout is attractive precisely because the arithmetic is not.
Same-game parlays. Legs from one match, correlated and repriced. Convenient, heavily marketed, and the widest-margin product on most sites by a clear distance.
Live betting. Prices update in play. The margin is wider than pre-match because the book is pricing under time pressure, and there is a delay between what you see and what is accepted.
A quick ranking by cost
Roughly, from cheapest to most expensive in margin terms: Asian handicaps, main-line spreads and totals in major leagues, two-way moneylines, three-way soccer, live markets, player props, futures, same-game parlays.
That ordering is not a recommendation about what to bet. It is a statement about what each market costs you before any opinion is involved, and it is stable enough to be worth remembering.
Now check the rules that settle them
Knowing what a market prices is half of it. Knowing when it voids is the other half.
Betting rules