Remove Vig from 3-way Odds Such as Soccer and Hockey

Click Here for our 2-Way No-Vig Calculator

3-way No-Vig Fair Odds Calculator
Odds No-Vig % No-Vig Odds

The calculator to the left can be used to remove vig from 3-way markets such as 1X2 used in football (soccer) and sometimes hockey. In other words it can be used to handicap the market price for sports where there is the option to bet on Home, Visitor, or Draw. This calculator supports both European decimal odds and American moneyline odds. Simply enter the set of odds the bookmaker is giving you for all three betting options to see the no-vig fair market price and win probabilities.

Best Use of This Calculator

For football (soccer) the betting website offering the best odds on average is www.sbobet.com (for 3-way hockey markets I would suggest using www.5dimes.eu instead for what is about to be shown). However, there are certainly times where Euro bookmakers are competitive on certain matches or other Asian bookies have a difference of opinion. Let’s say you notice that SBOBet has odds for an English Premier League match as Manchester United 1.806, Newcastle United 5.20 and Draw 3.65. After shopping the odds with the usual suspects you see SBOBet’s odds are best for most options with just one exception… BetOnline is offering Draw at 3.75. You’re now curious because you realize BetOnline is a very popular “recreational” sportsbooks that is mostly known as US betting site (servicing mostly punters from the United States and therefore not EPL specialists). You also know more often than not www.sbobet.com has the best odds – and that due to their high betting limits and reduced margins (less juice/bookmaker advantage) they can’t afford to offer +EV bets. So here you feel chances are pretty good SBOBet has the correct odds while BetOnline is catering to recreational punters. So this is where our tool comes in, we can use it to determine if SBOBet’s odds of 1.806, 5.20 and 3.65 are correct: does draw at 3.75 have value? Entering those all into the calculator I see the no-vig price on Draw is 3.7226 and therefore 3.75 at BetOnline is higher so this is very likely a +EV bet.

How to Remove Vig

Although our betting tool does the math for you, for those interested in the specifics on how to remove vig allow me to break this down for you. The math is to first convert the odds to implied probabilities, using the formula risk/return=implied probability. As we’re dealing with decimal odds we can keep it simple and make the risk amount 1 in which case our return is the same as the odds.

To use the previous shared example the math would look like this:

  • Manchester United 1.806 is 1/1.806= 0.5537 (55.37%)
  • Newcastle United 5.20 is 1/5.2= 0.1923 (19.23%)
  • Draw 3.65 is 1/3.65=0.2740 (27.40%)

Now understand implied probability refers to how often the selection must win in order to break even. If we were to add the implied probability of all three options we see 55.37+19.23+27.40=102.0%. The reason the total exceeds 100% is because the bookmaker has an advantage called vig. To remove this vig we simply divide all implied probabilities by the overall percent market (in this case 102%). The math for this appears below:

  • Manchester United 55.37% is 55.37/102=0.5429 (54.29%)
  • Newcastle United 19.23% is 19.23/102=0.1885 (18.85%)
  • Draw 27.40% is 27.4/102=0.2686 (26.86%)

You’ll now see 54.29+18.85+26.86 = 100%. The vig has been removed and what we now have is our no-vig win probabilities. Our final step is to convert these back into European decimal odds. Here we can either use our website’s odds converter tool, or we can do out the math. To do the math we first change our percentage back to a decimal (example 18.85% is 0.1885) and then use the formula (1/probability=European Odds). The math for each is as follows:

  • Manchester United 54.29% is 1/0.5429=1.842
  • Newcastle United 18.85% is 1/0.1885=5.305
  • Draw 26.86% is 1/0.2686=3.723

The above odds are the fair no-vig decimal odds. If we believe the odds we started with are accurate with vig distributed evenly all we need to do now is find any recreational betting site offering better odds than any of these figures to have a +EV (positive expected value) wager. Keep in mind www.sbobet.com offers by far the best odds in the industry while you can find off market odds at recreational sportsbooks such as Bet365 and countless others. Using our tool to remove vig from SBOBet’s odds and then shopping as many recreational betting sites as possible looking for a line to beat them, is a great way to make long term sports betting profits.