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Personally, I'm very skeptical that how the public bets dictates the line more than a bunch of stat/prob geniuses with primo intel just predicting games with a closer accuracy than anyone else can. I'll admit, though, that my skepticism may be grounded in something other than sound reason. It just feels wrong to me. Maybe that's because the first 100 times I heard this theory, it came from poker fish who were using it as terrible justification for how they (as ignorant shmoes who couldn't name so much as name 2 of the 6 nickel CBs who line up for the two teams involved in the games they bet on) can beat the house.
But I do have more rational quibbles with this idea:
1) A straight up bet for or against "the line" is not the only bet that exists. Vegas makes a ton of money off of the teasers, superteasers, all sorts of parlays, etc. So Vegas could not simply play two simple, dichotomous parties against each other. You might argue that this merely complicates the process, but it also creates more opportunity for arbitrage if Vegas isn't setting the odds based on actual results that they think might actually happen in the real world.
EG: Going into the NFL Wild Card matchup between the Cowboys and Lions, it was observed that the Cowboys were 7-point favorites according to Vegas, but then dismissed because, you know, Vegas isn't actually out to predict winners and losers. By the way, the O/U was set at 48, which is a fairly offensive prediction. Okay, so maybe 7 points is just how many points it took to get enough people to bet for the Lions to even out the action. But this also exposes bookies to having a run of people betting on the Teaser: the Lions lose by less than 14 points with a combined point total lower than 55 points.
I don't think the oddsmakers would expose themselves to that bet unless they did, in fact, see the Cowboys as a pretty heavy favorite and did, in fact, think that offense was going to win the day.
2) In this day and age, where anyone can know everything and bet any amount of money on anything from anywhere, bookies expose themselves to a ton of risk if they set a whacky line. The concept of playing the bettors against each other just seems a bit dated, like it harkens back to a time when bookies were a bunch of slick-talking salesmen who knew nothing about what they were selling, but knew how to play all sides against each other, and who had to answer to their bosses if they lost them a lot of money. And the consumers were simply gamblers.
Today, there are precious few secrets when it comes to making an easy buck. Arbitrages dry up quickly and get sucked up by a rich few. If it were the case that lines were routinely and easily exploitable, then surely half of Wall Street would become sports bettors, and this money would quickly dwarf whatever Joe the Racetrack Bettor is putting down, and no amount of last-second line moves would be able to counteract the bets.
The simplest explanation seems to me that oddsmakers just have the best experts at their disposal, the most advantageous statistical models, etc, and leverage that to set unbeatable odds.
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How Does Vegas Set the Line?
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Originally Posted by surviva316
