A popularity poll is the one thing that Vegas SB odds cannot afford to be. You are not gambling against other people here but against the house. If the house was to offer a payout appropriate for low odds when the actual likelihood was much higher, they would have huge outstanding expected losses, and it would only be a matter of time before it caught up with them and they went bankrupt.HawkWow":39uboebb said:Someone will jump in with the Vegas odds...and in advance, I ask you to resist that temptation. The Vegas odds are nothing more than a popularity poll...
Betting markets are a coveted source of information for economic analyses specifically because when real money is involved people tend to put less weight on things like popularity.
The sort of fans who post on internet forums in the offseason do tend to be very informed about their teams, however, I would not want to pick against any of the professional odds makers. The ones who are still employed earn a lot of money because they are good at what they do, and have a wealth of guarded inside information about the effects of dozens of splits that most fans here would not really consider.HawkWow":39uboebb said:and we know this team a heck of a lot better than the best line setter in Vegas.
More importantly, only the initial odds are set by a small group of people. They are opened up to a pool of experienced gamblers who have the chance to make bets on any lines they disagree with (and move the lines slightly as a result), and then opened up to the general public where they move to reflect how the widespread public is betting. Perhaps counter-intuitively, opening up betting to a wider audience improves them further due to the phenomenon known as the Wisdom of the Crowd.
Wisdom-of-the-crowds research routinely attributes the superiority of crowd averages over individual judgments to the elimination of individual noise,[5] an explanation that assumes independence of the individual judgments from each other.[3][6] Thus the crowd tends to make its best decisions if it is made up of diverse opinions and ideologies.
Note that this functions primarily by eliminating "noise"... otherwise known as popularity.