Negative Odds in Betting

What negative odds mean

Odds, at their simplest, describe what you are paid if your bet wins. In table games they refer to the total amount you are paid if your bet wins, and are typically expressed in ratios⁵. In sports betting they are the price a bookmaker attaches to each possible outcome. Across most of the world that price is a positive number, whether shown as a decimal, a fraction, or a ratio. You can read more about those systems in our guide to betting odds explained.

A negative price works differently. Instead of telling you how much you stand to win, it tells you how much you need to stake in order to win a fixed amount. That is the core idea in every format that uses minus signs, whether it is American odds, Indonesian odds or Malay odds. The negative Indo odds, for example, show how much you need to bet in order to win one unit, not how much you could possibly win².

Why would a price be written that way? Because the outcome is a favorite. The bookmaker thinks it is likely to happen, so the profit on offer is smaller than the amount you risk. Writing the price as a negative number is a compact way of saying "stake this much to win that much." Malay odds work on the same logic: they indicate the profit on a unit stake, positive for underdogs and negative for favorites³.

If you have read about odds-on prices in fractional odds, you already know the concept. A fraction where the left number is smaller than the right, such as 1/2, is called odds-on, and it means the same thing a minus sign means in American, Indonesian and Malay odds: a likely outcome that pays less profit than your stake⁶.

One thing to keep in mind before going further: a minus sign never means you are betting against the outcome or that the price is somehow "wrong." It is purely a notation. It also does not change the basic arithmetic of gambling, which is that the odds always include the bookmaker's margin, and over time you will lose more often than you win⁵.

American odds: reading the minus and plus signs

American odds, also called US odds or moneyline odds, are the most common odds format found in the United States⁷. They are usually written as a three-digit number with a sign in front of it, and in a two-way market you will normally see one positive and one negative number side by side¹.

The signs carry two pieces of information at once:

• Who is the favorite. The minus sign marks the favorite, the side the bookmaker expects to win. The plus sign marks the underdog¹.
• What the number means. For the favorite, the number after the minus shows the amount you have to stake to win $100. For the underdog, the number after the plus shows the amount you win for each $100 staked⁷.

So a market shown as -150 and +130 is telling you two things: the first side is expected to win, and the prices are set around the $100 benchmark. The same convention appears in other American-style markets too. In point spread betting, the minus value goes to the favorite and the plus to the underdog, and in Asian handicap football lines a minus marks the team giving the handicap while a plus marks the team receiving it, with the number of goals following the sign⁸.

Even odds sit right on the boundary between the two signs. Even odds are quoted as +100 or -100, and some but not all bookmakers display the positive symbol, so you may see a bare 100 meaning the same thing⁹. If you want to go deeper into the format as a whole, see our page on American odds.

Minus odds: how much you stake to win $100

Here is the rule for any negative American price: the number shows how much you need to bet to win $100⁴. That is all a minus price is saying.

Take -150 as an example. The minus tells you this side is the favorite. The 150 tells you that you need to stake $150 to win $100 in profit. If your bet wins, you receive your $100 profit plus your original $150 stake back. If it loses, you lose the $150.

A few things worth noticing about minus prices:

• The payout is lower than the wager. A minus number indicates the expected winner with a lower payout than the amount you stake⁴. That is the trade-off for betting on the likelier side.
• The bigger the number, the bigger the favorite. A price of -150 pays more profit per dollar staked than a price of -400, because -400 requires you to stake $400 to win the same $100.
• The profit scales with your stake. The $100 benchmark is just a unit of measurement. If you stake $75 at -150, your profit is proportionally smaller; the price itself does not change.

The same idea appears in the Asian formats. With negative Indo odds, the amount you enter on a bet slip is your potential winning, not your stake: if you choose Indo odds of -1.08 and enter $200 on the bet slip, that $200 is the potential winning, and the stake is larger². Malay negative odds are quoted per unit stake instead of per $100, but the direction is identical: negative means favorite, and the profit is less than the amount you risk³.

If you find the relationship between stake, profit and total return confusing, our page on stake, profit and return breaks down which odds formats include your stake in the quoted number and which do not.

Plus odds: what a $100 bet returns

Plus odds are the mirror image. When a plus sign is present, the odds show how much you could win on a $100 bet¹⁰. A price of +150 means a $100 stake returns $150 in profit if it wins, plus your stake back.

The plus sign marks the underdog, the side with a higher payout because the bookmaker considers it less likely to win¹⁰. This is the same logic you see in any odds system: lower prices correspond to likelier outcomes, while higher prices mean the outcome is deemed less likely and will return more⁶. In horse racing, the extreme case is the longshot, the horse with the least money bet on it and therefore the highest odds¹¹.

A worked comparison makes the two signs clear. In the same market:

• -150 (favorite): stake $150 to win $100 profit.
• +150 (underdog): stake $100 to win $150 profit.

Notice the symmetry. The bookmaker has set these prices so that the favorite requires a bigger outlay for a smaller profit, while the underdog offers a bigger profit for a smaller outlay. Neither price is "better" on its own; it depends on which outcome you think will happen and how the prices compare to the true chances. Our page on expected value explains how to think about that comparison over many bets.

One caution that applies to both signs: a higher payout always means a lower chance of winning. That rule holds in casino games too, where the higher the payout odds, the less likely the outcome will occur⁵. Chasing big plus prices to win back losses is not a winning approach in any format.

Where negative odds appear: moneyline sports

The home of negative odds is the moneyline market. A moneyline wager is simply a bet on the team or player you think will win the game, with no points or goals spread involved¹. The odds that accompany moneyline bets are American odds, which is why minus and plus signs are so common on these boards¹.

You will run into moneyline prices, and therefore minus signs, most often in head-to-head sports where a draw is impossible or rare:

• American football. Sportsbooks offer moneyline, spread betting and player proposition bets on American football, and the moneyline board is where the classic minus prices live¹².
• Combat sports. UFC betting is built around moneyline odds, with the favorite carrying the minus sign, alongside markets like method of victory and round betting⁴.
• Tennis. Tennis match odds are a two-way market, so one player is always minus and the other plus¹⁰.

Moneyline odds are the most common odds format found in the United States, so if you are betting with a US-facing bookmaker or reading American sports coverage, these are the prices you will see¹. In Asia, the same minus notation appears in the Indonesian and Malay odds formats used by regional sportsbooks, particularly on football handicap lines³.

It is worth separating the moneyline from the point spread, because the signs look similar but mean different things. A point spread bet is not about who wins but about the margin: betting against the spread means betting the underdog will do better than the spread suggests⁸. On a spread market, the favorite gets the minus value and the underdog the plus, but the number refers to points, not to a stake-to-win-$100 ratio⁸. Our page on point spread betting covers how those lines are written.

A note on how these prices behave over time: like all bookmaker odds, moneyline prices move. In pari-mutuel horse racing, odds change from moment to moment as money enters the pools, and a smaller multiplier indicates a more popular selection¹³. Fixed-odds moneyline prices also shift as bookmakers adjust their books, which is covered in our page on why odds change.

The same favorite in three minus-sign formats

Because American, Indonesian and Malay odds all use negative numbers for favorites, it helps to see them side by side. Each format expresses the same idea with a different benchmark:

The pattern is the same in all three: the minus sign marks the favorite, and the number is a stake requirement rather than a profit amount. American odds scale everything to $100, while the two Asian formats work per unit, which is why their negative numbers look so different from American ones even when the underlying bet is identical.

Two practical differences are worth knowing when you switch between them:

• Bet slip behavior. On some sportsbooks, entering an amount against negative Indo odds means entering your potential winning, not your stake, so the slip calculates the larger stake for you². Always check which figure the slip is asking for before confirming.
• Even odds. The boundary point is quoted as +100 or -100 in American odds, and not every bookmaker shows the plus symbol⁹. In Malay odds, favorites are shown as negative numbers and underdogs as positive ones, so the same favorite carries a minus sign there too³.

If you want to see which formats are used where, our page on odds formats by jurisdiction maps them across the region, and our conversion guide shows how to move between decimal and Malay prices.