How to Quickly Calculate Your Sports Betting Edge

The Edge Tool is one of the simplest, most intuitive features of Unabated – and also one of the most powerful. It’s how you can find a betting edge at a glance and zero in on targets in the hunt for plus-EV wagers.

At its core, the Edge Tool looks for the best available line on a game and compares it to the Unabated Line (which is our curated, vig-free number blended from market-making sportsbooks like Bookmaker, Circa and others.)

Let’s take a look at a past college hoops slate where there were was plenty of green lighting up the board. The total for Denver and Houston Christian was showing a nice little edge on the odds screen. 

At PointsBet, the Pioneers and Huskies were -110 to Over 150.5. The Unabated Line for the game was 151.5 at -107. We already know that because the Unabated Line is a vig-free number, if we can do better than that price, we’re looking at a potential plus-EV spot. Getting a full point at nearly the same price seems enticing.

Just to be sure, let’s make sure we’re comparing apples to apples.

If we take out the Compare Lines Calculator, we see that 151.5 (-107) is equivalent to 150.5 (-119). That’s our vig-free target price on the Unabated Line expressed at 150.5 instead of 151.5.

But we’re getting Over 150.5 at -110 at PointsBet. Which means this bet is beating our source-of-truth line, and looks like a plus-EV play. We can check it against the Closing Line Value Calculator.

Plugging in both numbers, we see Over 150.5 (-110) would give us 3.74% CLV, or just about the 3.9% edge we saw with the tool. (The difference comes down to a rounding error along the way.) 

Does that mean you should blindly bet when you see a positive edge? Of course not. You should never blind-bet anything. Maybe your own work comes to a different conclusion about how a game should be priced than the Unabated Line. 

But the Edge Tool should help you identify which markets have discrepancies that are worth a closer look.