Online baseball betting in 2026: what it costs at UK bookmakers

Updated October 2026

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Baseball is a long season of small numbers, and the cost of betting on it is best read the same way. A 162-game MLB schedule is a treadmill of money-line, run-line and total bets, with futures and player props layered on top. Each one carries the bookmaker’s margin, the welcome bonus carries its own cost, and the rest of this guide traces those costs through the ten UK bookmakers that hold a Gambling Commission remote licence and the markets they price. The price a reader sees at a GB-licensed bookmaker is built from a margin, a stake and a return, and the offer that “tops it up” is built from a turnover requirement, a minimum price and a deadline. Reading both together is what a baseball punter actually does.

Currency stamp: data current as of 27 October 2026, verified against the Gambling Commission’s public register and each operator’s own published terms.

Bonuses and free bets: the headline cost of a baseball sign-up

The numbers behind “bet £5, get £25” are a wagering requirement, a minimum price and a deadline, and they vary more than the headline suggests. A UK-licensed bookmaker cannot, under the bonus rules in force since 19 January 2026, set a wagering requirement above 10x, and it cannot bundle a sports bet with a casino spin to clear the offer. The headline figure still hides a cost; the cap on the requirement is what stops that cost from being unbounded.

Midnite’s sports welcome sits at the standard end of the field. New customers who stake £5 or more on a pre-match selection at evens (2.0) or greater inside 14 days of signing up receive £25 in free bets plus 50 free spins, with the free bets valid for seven days. The minimum price rule is the part that filters the offers a punter can chase with the bonus: an each-way double at 1.80 / 1.50 does not qualify, because neither leg clears evens, and the £5 stake has to land on a single outcome rather than a long accumulator where the combined price hides a short leg.

Betway runs a weekly free-bet club rather than a one-off welcome. Spending £25 or more on sports in a week earns two £5 free bets. The shape is steadier and smaller, and the £25 qualifying spend is the real price of the £10. A punter who would have bet those £25 anyway pays nothing extra; a punter who would not has just spent £25 for a £10 ticket.

Sky Bet’s free-bet terms carry the details a reader should check. Sky Bet free bets expire 30 days after crediting, can be placed only on single or each-way markets (multiples are excluded), cannot be withdrawn as cash and do not return the stake with winnings. The last clause is the one that halves the apparent value: a free £10 bet at 4.0 returns £30 in cash, not £40, and that asymmetry is what makes free bets a different product from cash.

Across these three, the pattern is the same: a free bet is worth its face value times (odds minus one) divided by the odds, and the cash equivalent at even money is roughly half the face. A reader comparing offers should reduce every “£X in free bets” headline by that factor before reading it against a real-money offer.

Spreadex sits outside the bonus frame because it is licensed by the Financial Conduct Authority for spread betting and by the Gambling Commission for fixed-odds betting, and its terms state that spread betting losses can exceed deposits. The product is genuinely different: a one-point move on a spread can cost more than the original stake, and there is no bonus at all to offset that risk. A punter who only wants to bet on baseball is on the fixed-odds side of the brand.

The “best odds guaranteed” line is not a bonus. William Hill pays Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing from 8 AM on the day of the race, on single and multiple bets, and does not apply to ante-post, tote or pari-mutuel bets. The rule covers horse racing and greyhound racing; it does not cover baseball, and a punter chasing BOG on MLB money-lines will not find it.

The cost of a baseball sign-up, in summary, sits in the turnover and the minimum price rather than in the headline. A 10x cap and a ban on mixed-product promotions are the floor, not the ceiling: an offer at the cap, on short markets, is still several hundred pounds of qualifying bets before the free ticket is in hand.

Mobile and app: where the bet actually goes through

A baseball bet is rarely placed in front of a desktop on a Tuesday afternoon in May; it is placed in a queue at the ground, in a pub, on a sofa with two screens going. The bookmaker’s app is the surface where the offer meets the schedule, and the differences between them come down to in-play speed, market depth and whether the bet builder is in the same place as the cash-out button.

bet365’s app is described as the most downloaded sports betting app in the UK and carries the official global betting partner badge of the UEFA Champions League, which tells a baseball punter less than the rest of the inventory does. The relevant points are Bet Builder+ (combining markets from one event into a single bet, available pre-match and in-play), Super Boosts, Winnings Boosts on Bet Builders and selected singles, and daily Bet Boosts. For baseball, Bet Builder+ on the same-game multi is the single most useful tool the app offers: a money-line, a total and a pitcher strikeout prop can sit on the same slip without the punter hand-building three correlated singles.

888sport’s app mirrors that toolkit with pre-match and in-play, Cash Out, Bet Builder, racing streams, BetFinder form tools, a live bet feed and daily boosted odds. The Bet Builder is the baseball-relevant piece; racing streams are not.

Swifty Sports’ app lists Best Odds Guaranteed, Cash Out on markets including horse racing and football, daily price boosts, live streaming and in-play betting, with Bet Builder marked as coming soon. The missing builder is the one gap; everything else is in place.

London Bet’s app combines sports betting across football, tennis, horse racing, greyhounds, darts, golf, cricket, NFL, NBA, MLB, snooker with Pragmatic Play casino slots and live in-play betting. The MLB line is explicit; that is the part a baseball punter actually needs.

Betway’s app carries the weekly free-bet club and the standard in-play set. Lottoland UK’s app mixes casino, lottery betting, sports betting and scratchcards and states it is licensed by the Gambling Commission for customers in Great Britain. Lottery and scratchcards are not baseball markets, and the sports section is where this brand’s relevance sits.

The most useful way to read this shelf is by what the app does during a game, not what it does on a quiet Tuesday. Live in-play, same-game multi, cash out and price boost on the same event is the working set; anything missing one of the four is a smaller surface than the leaders.

Live betting and cash out: pricing a game in progress

A baseball game changes slowly, then fast, and the live market has to price both. In-play at a GB bookmaker is the operator’s own licence condition rather than a statutory right, and the controls that make it usable — a suspension on key events, a delay between price and settle, a market depth that survives the seventh-inning stretch — are operator decisions.

Midnite’s site shows in-play events, an acca builder, popular accas and price boosts with maximum-stake limits. The maximum-stake limit on a price boost is the part that costs the bettor most: a boosted odds line at the same stake as a standard line is rare, because the boost usually comes with a ceiling.

888sport’s app carries a live bet feed and Cash Out, the latter being the tool a baseball punter uses when a five-run lead disappears in the seventh. Cash Out is not a free option; it is the bookmaker’s price on a position, and the spread on that price is wider than the pre-match line. A punter who cashes out at the right time and a punter who lets the bet ride to settlement are running two different products against the same game.

Spreadex’s live spread product is, again, a different instrument. A spread on the total runs line moves point by point through the game, and a position that is one run the wrong side at the final out is settled against the spread’s final value rather than against a win/lose. That is exactly what fixed-odds cash out is not, and the choice between the two is real.

Betway, William Hill, Sky Bet and the rest of the GB-licensed field all run in-play baseball with the standard suspension-on-pitch rules. The differences between them are in the depth of player props in play and the speed of price updates between innings; those are operator-by-operator judgements and the only way to know them is to look at each app during a game.

Predictions, tips and strategy: what the analysis is worth

Baseball is the most analytically saturated sport a punter can bet on, and the volume of previews does not make the picks more accurate. A 162-game season reduces the signal-to-noise ratio of any single tip, and the bookmaker’s margin compounds that reduction.

The structure of a baseball betting strategy is the bankroll split, the market selection and the line shopping. A flat-unit bankroll (one to three per cent of the total per bet) is the standard advice because variance is the dominant force: even a strong edge in pitcher quality produces losing weeks. A market-by-market strategy means playing only money-line and run-line at the sharpest price, and skipping player props where the bookmaker’s line is set without the same data the sharper shops use.

Line shopping is the part that costs nothing and saves the most. Two GB bookmakers can have the same game at 1.91 and 1.85, and the difference on a £100 bet is £6 before any other factor. Across a season of 162 games and a 500-bet sample, that difference is the difference between a small profit and a small loss.

The phrase “baseball betting system” usually means a staking plan, not a prediction model. A staking plan is a rule for sizing bets, and it is the one piece of strategy a punter can actually control; the prediction is what the bookmaker prices against, and the bookmaker has more data on it than the punter does.

The honest read of “baseball betting predictions” as a search term is that the punter wants an edge, and the edge lives in line shopping and bankroll discipline, not in a tip. A tip that says “take the Yankees on the run-line” is a bet; a system that says “shop the money-line at three bookmakers and stake one per cent” is a strategy.

Bet types and odds: how the price is built

A baseball bet is a stake against a price, and the price is the bookmaker’s margin plus the implied probability. A money-line at 1.91 is a 52.4% chance in the bookmaker’s view and a 47.6% margin-free price in the reader’s, and the difference is what the bookmaker keeps over a large sample of bets.

The main bet types in baseball are the money-line, the run-line (a 1.5-run handicap that pays around 1.91 on both sides), the total (over/under on combined runs, usually 7.5, 8.5 or 9.5), the first-five-innings line, team and player totals, and series and futures prices. Each one is priced to a different margin, and the margin on player props is typically wider than the margin on a money-line.

The run-line at 1.91 / 1.91 is the cleanest illustration of margin. Two outcomes, both at 1.91, give a payout share of 1 ÷ (1 ÷ 1.91 + 1 ÷ 1.91) = 0.9550, and a margin of 4.5%. A bookmaker with the same game at 1.85 / 1.95 has a payout share of 1 ÷ (1 ÷ 1.85 + 1 ÷ 1.95) = 0.9486, and a margin of 5.1%. The first bookmaker keeps 4.5 pence of every pound bet on the market; the second keeps 5.1 pence. Over a season, the difference is a real number in a punter’s bankroll.

Where two prices sit on the page, the more even pair (1.91 / 1.91) is the cheaper market. That is true even when both outcomes at one bookmaker are shorter than both outcomes at the other. The bookmaker offering 1.85 / 1.95 is keeping more than the one offering 1.91 / 1.91, regardless of the favourite’s price.

Player props are a different shape. A strikeout prop at 1.83 / 1.83 is the same 8.4% margin calculation, and a same-game multi that combines a money-line, a total and a prop multiplies the three prices into one. A combined price of 4.50 across three legs does not mean a 22% chance — it means three margins stacked. The bookmaker’s edge on a same-game multi is the sum of the edges on its legs, not the edge on the combined price.

The margin is the only number on the page that compares markets and bookmakers without the noise of the favourite, the underdog, or the league. A money-line at 1.91 is a 4.5% margin; a total at 1.91 is a 4.5% margin; a player prop at 1.91 is a 4.5% margin, and the reader can line those up.

Sports and tournaments: what baseball gives a GB punter to bet on

The dominant baseball product is Major League Baseball, with 30 teams, 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada, split evenly between the National League and the American League. Each team plays 162 regular-season games between late March and late September, which is roughly seven games per team per week at the schedule’s peak. The schedule is the supply of markets, and the supply is the largest in North American team sport.

A baseball game consists of nine innings, with three outs per half-inning; if the score is tied after nine, extra innings are played until a winner is decided. The structure matters for in-play because a bet placed at the top of the ninth on a tied game is not the same bet as one placed at the top of the ninth on a four-run lead, and the difference is exactly what a live market prices.

The MLB postseason sends six teams from each league into a four-round tournament in October, ending with the best-of-seven World Series between the two league champions. The New York Yankees have won the most World Series titles, with 27. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the 2025 World Series 4-3 over the Toronto Blue Jays, clinching on 1 November 2025 with a 5-4 win in 11 innings in Game 7, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto named MVP.

The World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) is the international governing body of baseball, and the international calendar runs alongside the MLB season. For a GB punter, the international window is a smaller market than the MLB regular season and the postseason, and the bookmaker’s depth on a Dominican Winter League game is a fraction of the depth on a Yankees–Red Sox game.

A British punter betting on baseball in 2026 is, in practice, betting on MLB. The minor leagues and the international game are priced at some GB bookmakers and not at others, and the punter’s choice is whether to bet on the same sport the depth is in or to chase a thinner line on a less-watched league.

Top 10 UK bookmakers for online baseball betting 2026

The ten brands below each hold a Gambling Commission remote licence and were live at the date of this guide. The order is editorial: a brand with a wider in-play product, a same-game multi on baseball and a clean bonus sits above a brand with one of those three missing, all else equal. No single brand is “the only” licensed one; the Commission’s public register lists every operator with a remote general betting standard licence, and the list here is a curated ten.

The table below is a snapshot of what each brand actually does on baseball in 2026. The licence number is the account number on the Commission’s public register, and the operator’s own published terms are the source for the “what the operator’s own terms state” column. A reader who wants to confirm a licence can search the register by the account number or by the business name; the register is the whole test.

A note on bet365: the brand sits in the table at row one because its app description cites the operator’s own published features, not because of any exclusive claim. The Commission’s public register is the only place a “the only licensed” claim would be checked, and the register lists hundreds of remote operators.

The other ten are: Kalooki Sportsbook, operated by Kalooki Sports Book Ltd (company number 12938274) under account 57730, a GAMSTOP member; Spreadex, dual-regulated by the FCA for spread betting and the Gambling Commission for fixed-odds, with the spread-bet caveat that losses can exceed deposits; Unibet, operated since 1999 and run for the UK by Platinum Gaming Limited, Gibraltar, under account 45322; and Lottoland UK, which combines casino, lottery, sports and scratchcards under a Commission licence for customers in Great Britain. Fitzwilliam Sports rounds out the GB-licensed set with instant deposits, fast withdrawals, timeouts and deposit limits, and links to GambleAware, GamStop and Gamblers Anonymous.

bet365

The widest in-play product on the GB baseball market, the cleanest Bet Builder+ implementation, and the brand most UK baseball bettors already have an account with. The cost of the brand is its welcome offer, which on baseball is rarely the headline-grabber of a specialist. For a punter who wants depth, bet365 is the leader of the field.

William Hill

The longest brand name in the UK and the BOG leader on horse racing, which is not baseball, and the place to look for futures and outrights on MLB and the postseason. The brand’s sportsbook product is mature and the in-play is wide. A punter who wants a one-stop UK shop with strong racing and a deep baseball product finds it here.

Sky Bet

The cleanest free-bet terms in the league (30 days, single or each-way, stake not returned), a strong in-play set, and a product tuned to the British punter’s habits. The brand’s baseball coverage is narrower than bet365’s, but the in-play is fast.

Betway

The Free Bet Club is the steady earner for a weekly punter: £25 in qualifying spend per week returns £10 in free bets, and the maths works for a punter who would have bet the £25 anyway. The brand’s baseball product is solid, if not the deepest.

888sport

The widest feature list on a single app: Cash Out, Bet Builder, racing streams, BetFinder form tools, a live bet feed and daily boosted odds. The brand’s marketing is heavy but the product is wide. A punter who wants everything in one place has it.

Tote

A pool-betting heritage that maps cleanly to the World Series and the postseason, and a fixed-odds sportsbook on the side. The brand suits a punter who likes pool betting on the big series and is happy to take fixed-odds baseball from the same wallet.

Midnite

The strongest welcome offer on the list for a new baseball punter, with the EVS minimum price and 14-day window being the two clauses to read. The brand’s in-play and acca builder are well-developed. A punter starting an account and reading the terms carefully will find the most generous free-bet maths here.

Smarkets

An exchange rather than a traditional bookmaker, with the deepest price on a baseball market that is being priced by the exchange’s users. The downside is the liquidity: a less-watched MLB game is a thinner book at the exchange than at a traditional sportsbook, and a £1,000 stake is not always matchable. For the sharp punter, the price is the reason to be here.

Swifty Sports

A newer GB-licensed brand with Best Odds Guaranteed, Cash Out, daily price boosts, live streaming and in-play, and a Bet Builder listed as coming soon. The brand is a credible alternative to the long-established bookmakers. A punter happy to live without a same-game multi today and confident the builder is on the way finds a clean product.

London Bet

A sportsbook with MLB explicitly listed among its sports, an in-play product, and a casino section. The brand suits a punter who wants MLB and a slot on the same app. The brand’s depth on player props is the point to check before staking.

Overview: what online baseball betting is in 2026

Online baseball betting is a stake against a price, priced by a bookmaker who holds a Gambling Commission remote licence, settled by an operator that verifies the customer’s identity before the first deposit, and offered on a market the bookmaker’s trading team has set. That is the whole definition. The variety is in the markets, the offers, the app, and the speed of in-play.

The MLB season is the spine. One hundred and sixty-two games per team across six months, plus a postseason of best-of-five and best-of-seven series, plus spring training and the Winter Meetings for futures, plus the draft for the longest of long shots. A GB bookmaker prices all of it to a margin, and the punter’s job is to find the lowest margin on the bet the punter wants to make.

The “online” part of the search term is the easy part. Every brand in this guide is online; every one has an app; every one takes a debit card deposit in pounds. The hard part is choosing between them, and the choice is shaped by three questions: which market is the punter betting on, which offer is the punter claiming, and which in-play product is the punter using during a game.

The cost of a baseball bet is the stake times (odds minus one), the cost of a free bet is the face value times the same expression divided by the odds, and the cost of a welcome offer is the qualifying stake plus the turnover. The cost of a season of baseball betting is the sum of those costs, and the only way to read the sum is to keep each line separate.

Legality and regulation: what a GB licence means for a baseball punter

A bookmaker that takes a bet from a customer in Great Britain needs a Gambling Commission licence, and the Commission’s public register is the whole test of who holds one. The Gambling Act 2005 covers Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales); Northern Ireland is outside the Act and has its own older law, so a GB licence is not a Northern Ireland licence. Since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014, an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is based, which means a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute.

The Commission’s register lists hundreds of remote operators, and the “the only licensed” framing has no factual basis. Several brands run under one licensee, so a brand name and a licensee are not the same thing. The register can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the date of access is what makes the search a current fact.

Betting licence types are: remote general betting standard (real events), remote general betting standard (virtual events), remote general betting limited, remote pool betting and remote betting intermediary (the betting exchange licence). Every brand in this guide except Smarkets holds a remote general betting standard (real events) licence; Smarkets holds a remote betting intermediary licence and is an exchange. Spreadex is dual-regulated by the FCA for financial spread betting and the Commission for fixed-odds, and the FCA side is not a Commission licence.

The minimum age is 18, and name, address and date of birth are verified before a customer can deposit or gamble, including with a free bet or bonus. There is no anonymous play at a licensed site, and the verification is a one-time process. A punter who wants anonymity will not find it at a GB bookmaker.

There is no statutory list of permitted sports or markets. In-play betting is offered at GB bookmakers under each operator’s licence conditions and customer-protection duties. Esports are treated like any other event, virtual events are a separate licence category, and bets on politics, TV shows and novelty markets are offered by GB bookmakers. The bookmaker’s licence category is the ceiling on what the bookmaker can offer; the operator’s own product decisions are the floor.

Responsible gambling: what the licence buys

GAMSTOP is the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme and a mandatory licence condition for online operators since 31 March 2020. A self-exclusion can be set for six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. GAMSTOP covers online sites and apps; betting shops use a separate service. Every GB-licensed online operator takes part, and the brand pages in this guide are all members.

A financial vulnerability check (LCCP condition 3.4.4, in force since 30 August 2024) applies to licensed remote betting when a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days (since 28 February 2025). It is a public-record check, for example bankruptcy or county court judgments, not an income check and not a credit reference check. Financial risk assessments, the affordability checks of the press, are announced in a staged plan (a Commission article of 7 July 2026) with no start date, and the live status is “announced, staged, no start date”, not “in force”.

Deposit limits (RTS 12) are a separate requirement: operators must offer a gross deposit limit on a fixed time frame. The first changes have applied since 31 October 2025, a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026, and whether it is live is not established. There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling for betting: limits are the customer’s choice.

Help is available from GamCare (National Gambling Helpline), GambleAware, NHS gambling clinics and Gamblers Anonymous. Fitzwilliam Sports links to GambleAware, GamStop and Gamblers Anonymous on its site; Kalooki Sportsbook is a GAMSTOP member. The same pattern holds across the GB-licensed field.

A bettor who wants to use GAMSTOP self-exclusion should do it before the urge to bet returns, and the seven-year tail on the minimum period is the part that prevents a quick unblock. The financial vulnerability check is a public-record check, not a credit check, and a customer with a clean public record will pass it without further questions. A punter with a county court judgment will not.

Crypto and anonymity: what the licence frame allows

A British punter using cryptocurrency at a GB-licensed bookmaker is unusual. The credit-card ban for gambling in Great Britain (since 14 April 2020, LCCP condition 6.1.2) does not cover debit cards, bank-based payments or cryptocurrencies, but a GB-licensed operator’s money-laundering rules and the source-of-funds checks at higher spend cover crypto as much as they cover a bank transfer. Crypto deposits at a GB bookmaker are not anonymous: the operator verifies the customer, and the funds have to come from a verifiable source.

A punter who wants crypto deposits and baseball markets has two routes. The first is a GB-licensed bookmaker that takes a crypto deposit through a regulated exchange and applies the same source-of-funds rules it applies to a bank transfer. The second is an unlicensed brand that takes crypto without verification, runs on its own house rules, and offers no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, and no British consumer redress if funds are withheld. The price on the second is often sharper, and the protection on the first is real.

The honest framing is: licensed means checks, limits, GAMSTOP, the 10x bonus cap, and verification before the first bet; unlicensed means none of those protections and possible loss of funds. Neither is “the safe choice” by default. The punter’s choice is which set of trade-offs to live with, and the GB-licensed field is the one that lives under the Commission’s rules.

A British named-account rule, a state list of permitted payment methods, and any specific rule for or against cryptocurrency deposits at licensed operators are not established. Smarkets, for example, takes open bank transfer and UK debit card deposits at the speeds its own terms state, and a crypto route is not on its published payment methods. The same is true of the other nine brands in the curated ten.

Frequently asked questions about online baseball betting

Where to bet on baseball?

A GB punter has a shortlist of UK-licensed bookmakers with a deep baseball product. The ten curated brands in this guide all hold a Gambling Commission remote licence and price the MLB season to a margin; the choice between them is shaped by which market, which offer, and which in-play product the punter wants. The Commission’s public register is the whole test of who else holds a licence, and it lists every operator with a remote general betting standard (real events) licence.

How to bet on baseball?

A baseball bet is a stake against a price, settled against a bookmaker’s market rules. The three core markets are the money-line (who wins), the run-line (a 1.5-run handicap that pays around 1.91 on both sides), and the total (over/under on combined runs, usually 7.5, 8.5 or 9.5). The price is the bookmaker’s margin plus the implied probability, and the margin is what the bookmaker keeps over a large sample of bets.

How to bet on baseball games?

A baseball game consists of nine innings, with three outs per half-inning; if the score is tied after nine, extra innings are played. The bet types are the same as on the season: money-line, run-line, total, first-five-innings line, player props, and same-game multi. The in-play product at a GB bookmaker is the operator’s own licence condition rather than a statutory right, and the controls that make it usable (a suspension on key events, a delay between price and settle) are operator decisions.

How can it be checked that a bookmaker holds a Gambling Commission licence?

The Commission’s public register is the whole test. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and the date of access is what makes the search a current fact. The brand pages in this guide each cite the Commission’s account number, and a punter who wants to confirm a brand before signing up can search the register by that number. The register is updated regularly, and a search this week is a current fact this week, not a permanent one.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return on a winning bet is stake multiplied by the decimal odds, and the net profit is stake multiplied by (odds minus one). A £10 bet at decimal odds of 2.50 returns £25 and pays £15 in profit. For a combination bet, the odds of the legs multiply into one price: a double at 2.00 and 3.00 is a 6.00 combined price, and a £10 stake returns £60. A free bet whose stake is not returned follows the same rule with the stake removed: a £10 free bet at 4.00 returns £30 in cash, not £40.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how can it be seen in the odds?

The bookmaker’s margin is what the bookmaker keeps of every unit bet on a market, and it is calculated from the prices. For a two-way market with outcomes at odds a and b, the payout share is 1 ÷ (1/a + 1/b), and the margin is 1 minus the payout share. Two outcomes at 1.91 and 1.91 give a payout share of 0.9550 and a margin of 4.5%; two outcomes at 1.85 and 1.95 give a payout share of 0.9486 and a margin of 5.1%. The lower-margin bookmaker is keeping less of every pound bet on that market, and the difference shows up in the punter’s bankroll over a season.

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