Don P.
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Don P. has not written any posts yet.
Don P. has not written any posts yet.
Those odds are in the confusing "American format", in which a positive number is "how much would you win (in addition to your bet amount) on a $100 bet", and the negative number is -- careful here! -- how much would you have to bet in order to win $100, again in addition to getting your bet back. There are calculators to get the equivalence, since -- especially for the negative odds -- it's not real intuitive. So a 50/50 event should be +100 each way, and of course it never is. In this case, -160 would be fair odds for a 60% chance event, and +125 would be fair for a... (read more)
I posted this as a reply [and then posted it in the wrong subthread...reposting final version here] but I thought about it more, and on the Mets/Brewers odds thing, the "win %" from ESPN is something they've been doing for years. It's all over espn.com. It's not very smart, and doesn't have to be, because nothing is riding on it.
ESPNbet.com is licensed to use the ESPN name but is otherwise separate. Since their posted odds are their business, I expect them to be a lot more...meticulous, at least. The -160/+125 odds posted imply (after removing the house edge, aka de-vigging) a 58/42 probability split. And that represents only a 4.4% hold from those probabilities, so it's not outrageous. The standard -110/-110 on even money is a 4.8% hold.