Buying points, and the sell side nobody uses
Buying points moves the handicap in your favour and charges you in the price. Selling points moves it against you and pays you in the price. The standard football rate is around ten cents of American odds per half point, applied in either direction, with caps on how far a line may be moved and special rates at certain numbers.
Both directions are the same trade in opposite signs: the book is quoting an exchange rate between points and odds, and will trade with you at that rate either way. Selling exists because a bettor who is confident of a comfortable win has no use for the last point and would rather be paid for it than hold it.
Fewer books offer the sell side than the buy side, and those that do usually cap it at one or two points and refuse to trade through the same numbers where they charge a premium to buy. A missing sell button is a pricing decision, not an oversight.
What follows from that is less comfortable. The rate is flat at most books while the underlying value of a half point is not. A flat rate makes selling through a common margin a bad trade for you and selling through a rare one a reasonable trade, and the button gives no indication which is which.
What to do with it. Before selling any point, check what margin you are handing over and compare the payment to the flat rate at a rung where nothing common lives.
The archive
What the published price did in US sports
11,262 games in US sports that are over and carried a price when we wrote them up, between November 24, 2025 and November 6, 2026. Each count sits beside what it is out of, and the share is the one divided by the other.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| The shorter price won | 7,058 | 10,936 | 64.5% |
| The favourite covered the handicap | 3,373 | 7,003 | 48.2% |
| The total went over | 5,518 | 11,236 | 49.1% |
| The home side won | 6,361 | 11,262 | 56.5% |
How they ended
Over 16,021 finished games in US sports whose result line says how it ended — the feed's own one-line verdict, not a reading of the play.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Went past regulation | 1,212 | 16,021 | 7.6% |
| Settled on a shootout | 161 | 16,021 | 1.0% |
| Called before the end | 9 | 16,021 | 0.1% |
286 games landed exactly on the number — the handicap or the total — so they are in the counts they are out of and in neither result.
The prices counted here are DraftKings', as they stood when we last wrote each game up — one snapshot per game, near kick-off for almost all of them, and never a closing line. So this says what the published line did, not how it moved on the way there.
A season that happened. Nothing here predicts the next game, and none of it is advice.
Counted November 6, 2026.
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