Add up what a sportsbook says about the Super Bowl and the answer comes to more than certainty.
Convert every one of the 32 teams on BetMGM's board this morning into implied probability and the column totals 120.1%. The same exercise on bet365 totals 124.0%. Somebody wins the Super Bowl exactly once, so the honest total is 100. Everything above that line is the house's margin, priced into the numbers themselves.
What the numbers say
| Book | Board sums to | Margin |
|---|---|---|
| BetMGM | 120.1% | 20.1 points |
| FanDuel | 122.2% | 22.2 points |
| DraftKings | 122.5% | 22.5 points |
| Caesars | 122.5% | 22.5 points |
| bet365 | 124.0% | 24.0 points |
That margin is the vigorish — the commission built into the price itself. You never see it charged separately. A single-game moneyline usually carries three to five points of it. A 32-team futures market carries twenty-four, spread across thirty-two outcomes with each one absorbing a share.
Where it hides
A price is a statement about payout. Read it as a probability and you have already been charged.
Baltimore at +1100 implies 8.3% as a raw conversion. Strip the book's margin across the whole board and the market's real read on Baltimore lands closer to 6.7%. That 1.6-point difference is the commission, sitting inside the number where it is easy to mistake for information.
Every price you read on a board has already had the house's cut folded into it.
This is why the same team can look like value at one venue and like a trap at another. The teams have not changed. The margin loaded onto them has.
Three things this changes
- Compare across books first. The longest available price carries the least margin, which makes it the closest thing on the board to a clean number.
- Treat long futures with suspicion. Twenty-four points of margin on a six-month position is an expensive place to hold an opinion.
- Stop converting odds to probability in your head. The raw conversion overstates every outcome. The number worth having is the one left after the margin is removed, and reaching it requires the whole board. One line will not give it to you.
The Forecaster does the removal. Its market probability column is the de-margined read across five books, which is what makes any comparison against a projection meaningful.
The practical version
Two questions, before any futures position:
- What does this board sum to?
- Am I taking the longest price available on this outcome?
Neither question requires a view on the season. Both are answerable in under a minute, and between them they recover more expected value than most of the analysis people do instead.
Where those longest prices currently sit is the subject of Where the Super Bowl board is widest.
Board figures are the 32-team Super Bowl markets as of 17 August 2026, converted with the standard American-odds formula and summed per book. Background on how these margins are constructed: Mathematics of bookmaking.