This Week: Hansel Wei on Betting Runlines. Read the whole article in Hansel's Zone at GoSportsBet.

I’ve talked about betting major league baseball, and it seems that with the sun out and many ballgames on every day, we should take a more in-depth look at the considerable opportunities for bettors that this sport offers. Let’s quickly recap the idea behind moneylines. When you bet against the spread, you wager either that an underdog will either win outright or lose by less than a certain margin, or that a favorite will win by more than that margin. Against the spread, you generally lay -110 (risk $110 to win $100). With moneylines, you either pick the favorite and risk (x) to win $100, or pick the underdog and risk $100 to win (x). For instance, with the moneyline New England -160, Indianapolis +140, you could risk $160 to win $100 if New England won, or you could risk $100 to win $140 if Indianapolis won. The point is, when you bet on a moneyline, you pick which team will win the game outright. In a sense, runlines combine the two types of wagers. The “spread” is always -1.5 for the favorite. Why, you ask? Since baseball games cannot end in a tie (disregard the All-Star Game two years ago; it doesn’t count) a spread of -.5 would have no impact, and because about a quarter of all MLB games are decided by one run, a spread of -1 would result in a push a large portion of the time. Whereas in basketball and football the wager is fixed (-$110) and the spread moves to balance action, in baseball it is the spread that is fixed (-1.5) and the wager moves depending on which teams are drawing bets. Thus, the favorite is forced to win by two runs. When wagering on runlines, both listed pitchers must start, and the game must go 8.5 innings. As you can see, the only time there is a difference between the runline and moneyline results for a game is when the favorite wins by exactly one run. In exchange for assuming the extra risk of wagering on a runline favorite (the risk being that they will win by one run only, and thus lose the bet) bettors get a much more lucrative payout than they would on the moneyline. Conversely, while betting the dog gives you a greater likelihood of winning (one-run losses are a winning bet) the payouts are not as large as they would have been if you’d bet the moneyline and your underdog had won outright. Each type of wager will have value in different situations; the key is...

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