VIG (Vigorish)

What VIG (Vigorish) means

The vig - short for vigorish, and often called "juice" - is the fee built into a sportsbook's odds on both sides of a bet. It's the mechanism that lets a sportsbook profit even on a market that's perfectly balanced between two outcomes. Take a standard point-spread bet priced at -110 on both sides: if the odds were "fair," each side would pay out at even money (+100), reflecting a true 50/50 proposition. Instead, both sides are priced at -110, meaning you have to risk $110 to win $100. That gap between the fair price and the actual price is the vig, and on a standard -110/-110 spread it works out to roughly 4.5–4.8% of the total handle on that market, regardless of which side wins. You can calculate it yourself: convert each side's odds to implied probability (110/(110+100) = 52.38% per side), add the two together (104.76%), and the amount over 100% is the book's edge. Vig isn't fixed - sportsbooks widen it on markets with less betting volume, more variance, or more information asymmetry, which is why a player prop or an obscure college game often carries worse odds than an NFL spread on a marquee matchup. Shopping for the lowest vig on a given bet, across multiple sportsbooks, is one of the simplest and most repeatable edges a recreational bettor can build into their habits, since even small vig differences compound significantly over hundreds of bets.

Key points

• The vig - short for vigorish, and often called "juice" - is the fee built into a sportsbook's odds on both sides of a bet.
• That gap between the fair price and the actual price is the vig, and on a standard -110/-110 spread it works out to roughly 4.5–4.8% of the total handle on that market, regardless of which side wins.
• Shopping for the lowest vig on a given bet, across multiple sportsbooks, is one of the simplest and most repeatable edges a recreational bettor can build into their habits, since even small vig differences compound significantly over hundreds of bets.

Example and context

Related glossary terms

These terms sit in the same part of the betting vocabulary and are useful to read next.