No-vig & hold calculator
Strip the vig to find the fair odds — two-way markets and three-way soccer.
Moneylines, spreads and totals — any market with exactly two settling outcomes.
Bookmaker hold (vig)
4.76%
Fair odds — A
+100
Fair odds — B
+100
Fair win % — A
50%
Fair win % — B
50%
“Fair” odds remove the book’s margin — the true price the market implies.
What “no-vig” means
Books build in a margin — the vig (or “hold”) — so the outcomes of a market add up to more than 100%. Removing it proportionally gives the fair odds: the market’s honest estimate of each outcome’s true probability, with the house edge stripped out.
Those fair probabilities are the best free estimate of “true odds” you can get, and they’re the input the EV calculator needs. Find a book offering a better price than the fair line and you’ve likely found value — exactly what Bankroll Guardian flags automatically across your books.
Three-way markets, and the mistake that looks like free money
Soccer settles on three outcomes, not two. The maths does not change — add the implied probabilities, divide each by the total — but every outcome has to be in the sum, and the draw is the one people drop.
Drop it and the error does not merely make the hold a bit wrong; it flips the sign. A normal 1X2 market at +135 / +230 / +220 holds about 4%. Price only the two teams and it reads as roughly −26% — a large, obvious, entirely imaginary arbitrage. Switch the calculator above to three-way and it will show you both numbers for whatever prices you enter.
Related: the Guardian Line · EV calculator · arbitrage calculator · vig by sport study
Common questions
- What does no-vig mean?
- Sportsbooks price a market so the outcomes add up to more than 100% implied probability. The excess is their margin — the vig, or hold. Removing it proportionally gives the fair odds: the market's own estimate of each outcome's true probability with the house edge stripped out.
- How do you de-vig a three-way market?
- The same way as a two-way, but all three prices must be in the sum. Convert home, draw and away to implied probabilities, add them up, and divide each by that total. The three results sum to 100% by construction. The method is identical; the mistake is leaving an outcome out.
- Why can't I just ignore the draw in soccer?
- Because the draw is a settling outcome — you lose to it. Price only the two teams and the sum falls well short of 100%, so the hold reads as negative, which looks exactly like an arbitrage. At +135 / +230 / +220 the true hold is about 4%, but drop the draw and the same market appears to offer a 26% edge. That edge does not exist, and acting on it is a guaranteed loss.
- What is a normal hold on a soccer 1X2 market?
- Typically a little higher than a two-way market, because there are three outcomes to price. Bankroll Guardian's own study of captured market data measured consensus margins of 4.47%–4.78% across six two-way sports; three-way soccer generally runs above that. Shopping the best price on each outcome removes roughly half of whatever the margin is.
- Are no-vig odds the true odds?
- They are the market's estimate of true odds, not the truth. De-vigging removes the book's margin but keeps whatever the book got right or wrong. That estimate is hard to beat, which is why it is the sensible baseline — but a single book's de-vigged line is weaker than a consensus across many, which is what the Guardian Line is built from.
- Does removing the vig proportionally favour favourites?
- It can. Proportional removal assumes the margin is spread evenly across outcomes, and there is good evidence books load more of it onto longshots. That bias matters most in markets with a heavy favourite and a long price. We use proportional removal consistently — for this calculator, the consensus and the Guardian Line — so the numbers you see here match the numbers the product acts on.
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