A lot of baseball bettors don’t like to lay the huge juice on the favorites, and instead will play the run line. It’s easy to see why so many players get attracted to the -1.5 run line. A favorite who is -150 on the money line could very well be +150 on the run line. The problem with this bet is if the favorite only wins by one run, you end up going home empty-handed.
While you don’t lose any juice by playing the run line, it still stings when you just miss out on what would have been a winner if you had played the money line. That is why I want to share with you how you can turn the -1.5 standard run line in all MLB games into a -1 run line.
The way to turn the -1.5 run line into a -1 run line is to make two separate bets; one on the money line and one on the run line. This doesn’t require you to bet any more than what you were originally betting.
In order to make this work, you simply split up your original bet to where you cover your losses if a favorite only wins by one run. The key part of this whole deal is making sure that your winnings from your money line bet will cancel out your losses from your run line bet. Now, if the favorite wins by just one run, you end up pushing.
Here is an example to help you understand how it works. Say you have New York Yankees -150 on the money line and +145 on the run line. If you were to bet $100 on the Yankees -150, you would win $66.67. Like we mentioned earlier, you want to use that potential profit as your run line wager. That means you would also have a $66.67 bet on the Yankees -1.5 (+145). This wager would bring you a $96.67 profit. All in all you would be wagering $166.67 to win $163.34. If you were to bet $166.67 on the money line alone, you would only win $111.11!
While you won’t get the same returns as you would if you were to simply put all your money on the run line, you have essentially turned a -150 favorite into -103 favorite. You still need the favorite to win by two runs, but now you can still walk away unharmed if it ends up in a one run win instead of coming out empty-handed.
Wondering how you figure out how much your money line winnings will be in order to know how much to bet on the run line? Many online sportsbooks will have a feature where you can simply click on the bet you want to make and type in how much you want to wager and it will tell you the expected winnings.
If you have a specific amount you want to bet on the game, these calculators will be very useful. For the calculator at Online Gambling, you would first put in the odds listed on the money line, and then in the bet amount you would put in a number roughly around 60% of your set bet amount. For example, if you only had $100 to bet total on the Yankees -150 and -1.5 (+145). you would bet $60 on the money line and $40 on the run line.