market
Point Spread
Also known as: Spread, Line, ATS
A point spread is a market that handicaps the favorite by a number of points, requiring the favorite to win by more than the spread for a bet on the favorite to cash. The underdog covers by either winning outright or losing by less than the spread.
The point spread is the market that equalizes two teams of different strengths by adding or subtracting points. Books set the spread at the number where they expect roughly equal action on both sides, which sometimes corresponds to the true win-margin expectation and sometimes is shaded by public bias.
Standard price on a point spread is -110 on both sides (roughly 4.5% vig). Books occasionally publish reduced juice (-105 each side) on lower-volume markets or as promotional pricing. Spreads in football tend to land near the actual final margin (a 3-point spread predicts a 3-point game more often than chance), which means small spread movements (3 to 3.5, 6.5 to 7) are meaningful because they cross common margins of victory.
Worked example. NFL game: Team A -3.5 (-110). Final score is Team A 24, Team B 20. Team A wins by 4, covering -3.5. A $100 bet returns $190.91. If the spread had been -4 (a “key number” in NFL), the bet would have pushed (no win, no loss, stake refunded). The half-point matters: empirical NFL data shows games landing on 3 about 9% of the time and on 7 about 8%, so buying or selling the half-point across those numbers has nonlinear value.
Elite Picks’ team-level models project win-margin distributions, not just point estimates. The model can therefore price every alternate spread, not just the main line, and identify cases where a half-point off the main number has outsized expected value relative to its cost in juice.
Example
Team A -7 means Team A must win by 8 or more points to cover. Team B +7 means Team B can lose by up to 6 points (or win outright) and still cover.