What is reverse line movement in sports betting?
Every sportsbook in the world is making money through guaranteed profit, integrated in what we call ‘vig’ or ‘juice’. Bookies don’t just wait to see whether they will win the bets and so profit from punters’ losses – they have a built-in profit margin that ensures that they will win no matter what. And this is what keeps them going on in a market that is so volatile and fast changing.
Bookmakers, including UFC betting sites, are setting odds and they are selling lines and bets to their customers. But they are not rigid or inflexible, since everything is fluid in the world of sports.
One of the most common things in sports betting is line movement, which reflects the bookmakers’ adjustment and re-adjustment of lines whenever they want to respond to some trigger or change in the market.
Now, that trigger may be either something related to the sport, the game itself or the athletes – a fighter’s injury for example -or it might be related to how the market moves regarding the UFC bet.
If the majority of bettors – the public – for example, put their money on a specific side of a bet and this side gathers the large volume of betting tickets, then the bookmakers adjust the line to make things more even. They don’t want a skewed distribution of bets. They ensure that they get their guaranteed profit, if the distribution is more close to a balanced bet.
In simple words, the sportsbooks have their oddsmakers gradually move the lines so that bettors will eventually land their bets on the side where bet tickets are actually missing. In doing so, the lines are moved so that the other side becomes a more attractive choice for the punters.
Reverse line movement
But there are some cases, where the line does not move in favor of the opposite side, but in favor of the side that is already loaded with bets. It may sound strange, but it is not uncommon in sports betting.
This is a typical example of a reverse line movement, where the line moves against “common sense”. When one side of the bet accumulates more wagers from the average punters, then one would expect that oddsmakers would move the line to offset this one-sided preference and attract wagers on the other side as well.
But here, instead of making the other side more attractive, the oddsmakers trigger further bets on the same side that has already gathered bets.
RLM and sharp bettors
Why would bookmakers do something like that and risk their guaranteed profit? In fact they are not risking more than their trust on sharps allows them to do. When there is a reverse line movement, in nearly 90% of cases – unless something else has changed – there is sharp action behind it.
If sharp bettors unanimously land their big money on a given line or a given side, then the sportsbooks make a reverse line movement because they choose to be on their side.
They assume that they most probably have some critical edge or that they know something that the betting sites don’t know and this has caused sharp money to be wagered on a specific side.
Choosing to be on their side and opting for winning big means that they want the average punters’ bets to go with the stream – which is opposite to the sharp bettors' bet. And for that reason, they make a popular line, even more popular and more enticing by moving the line accordingly.
Now, since reverse line movement in many cases indicates sharp action, you and I, as average bettors, should be alert for tracking RLM. If we manage to track RLM – which is not that difficult, considering that others can do this for you(!) – then that’s the tricky part.
Potentially, tracking RLM would give us a chance to increase our winning probabilities because we would have a clue as to where sharp money has been wagered.
But the truth is that by the time we are able to track reverse line movement, there is little chance of finding value because all bookmakers will move quickly enough to adjust. If we are lucky enough to find bookies that are slow to respond, then we should definitely bet on what sharps are betting!