What the hold is
The hold — The share of everything wagered that a book expects to keep once both sides are priced. A typical two-way market holds four to five per cent of turnover.
It is the overround expressed as a business metric. The book does not expect to win every bet; it expects to keep this fraction of everything that passes through, whatever happens.
Actual hold differs from theoretical hold, because action is rarely balanced and books take positions deliberately.
And that is the trap. A low hold is not generosity. It usually appears on markets a book is most confident it prices better than its customers, which is why the sharpest markets are the cheapest.
What to do with it. Read a low hold as a signal about the book's confidence rather than as a bargain.
Work it out. The no-vig calculator takes both sides of a market and returns the margin and the fair price of each.
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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