Betting terms
What is hold in sports betting?
By DeepChamp research team · Updated · Methods and limitations
Definition
Hold is the share of the money wagered on a market that the operator expects to keep after paying winners. For a two-way market priced -110 on both sides, the implied probabilities total 104.76 percent, and dividing the 4.76-point margin by that total gives a hold of about 4.55 percent.
How it works
Hold and vig are close relatives that describe the same margin from different angles. The vig is the margin sitting inside the prices, stated in points above 100 percent. The hold restates it as a share of the total, which is the operator's expected take per unit of money wagered if the action is balanced. The formula is the total of the implied probabilities minus 1, divided by that total, so 4.76 divided by 104.76 gives 4.55 percent for -110 on both sides.
Two meanings are easy to blur. The theoretical hold is the figure that follows from the posted prices if money arrives in the proportions that leave the operator with the same result either way. The realized hold is what is actually kept, which depends on where the money landed and which side won, and on a single game it can sit far from the theoretical number, even below zero. Revenue reports for a league or a season commonly express realized hold as revenue divided by handle, the total amount wagered.
Hold also depends on the type of market. A three-way market must include every outcome in the total, and combined tickets raise it because each leg brings its own margin: if both legs truly had a 50 percent chance, two legs at -110 would return on average about 91.12 per 100 staked, against 95.45 for a single leg. Researchers use hold to compare how much each market costs before they compare opinions about the outcome.
Balancing the money across -120 and +100
A hypothetical market is posted at -120 on one side and +100 on the other. Suppose 120,000 is wagered on the -120 side and 110,000 on the +100 side. If the -120 side wins, it is paid 100,000 of profit and the operator keeps the 110,000 from the other side, a result of 10,000. If the +100 side wins, it is paid 110,000 and the operator keeps 120,000, again 10,000. The operator keeps 10,000 of 230,000 wagered, a hold of 4.35 percent, which matches the price math: 54.55 plus 50.00 is 104.55, and 4.55 divided by 104.55 is 4.35.
Hypothetical numbers for arithmetic only.
Why it matters when you research a bet
Hold turns a pair of prices into one cost figure that can be compared across markets and operators. A lower hold generally means a smaller hurdle for any estimate, so a researcher can see why the same opinion may be easier to act on at one price than another. It also reframes the operator's side: a hold figure describes what the market is built to retain on average, not what any single customer will experience.
Common mistakes
- Treating hold as the cost of an individual ticket. It describes the operator's share of a balanced market; what a particular bet earns or loses on average depends on the true chance of the outcome.
- Expecting realized hold to equal the posted figure. On one game the money may sit on a single side, so results swing well away from the theoretical number in either direction.
- Leaving out an outcome. In a three-way market the hold has to be computed across all outcomes, and totaling only two of them understates the margin.
Common questions
Is hold the same as vig?
They are related but not identical. The vig is the margin built into the prices, measured in points above 100 percent. The hold expresses that margin as a share of the total, or as the share of handle actually kept, so -110 on both sides is a vig of 4.76 points and a hold of about 4.55 percent.
Can an operator's hold on a single game be negative?
Yes. Hold is a long-run, market-level average. On a single game, if most of the money sits on the side that wins, the operator pays out more than it collects, so the realized hold for that game is below zero.
How do you calculate hold from American odds?
Convert each side to an implied probability, add them, subtract 1, and divide by the sum. For -120 and +100 the sum is 104.55 percent, so the hold is 4.55 divided by 104.55, or about 4.35 percent.
This is educational research content. Examples use hypothetical numbers and are not live odds, picks, or claims about performance.
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