Handicapping guru and LVASportsboards co-moderator Fezzik responds:
A soft line is a line that's out of whack with the marketplace and can be exploited by bettors who know they're getting better than the market number. Soft lines are usually associated with two things.
1. Openers dealt with small limits. A good example would be the opening WNBA totals. You might see a 158 put up … blink … and 30 seconds later it's 153. It might sound like a great opportunity, but the hawks will be there to get it, and even if they aren't, the limits are $500. Not exactly a get-rich scheme to exploit.
2. Rogue lines at out-of-the-way books, low-limit books, and books that simply don't let the sharps play. At one of these places you might see +11 on a game that everyplace else has +10.5, and the sharp books are moving to +10. Nevada used to be a great place for finding these types of soft lines, but the times they are a changin'. Places like Primm (which it could be argued was the king.Wendover, at the Nevada/Utah border, was even better. Another one was Fandango in Carson City! Alas, these independent books are largely gone. Now, you have to do some searching and go to places with really low limits, like Jerry's Nugget, to find the soft numbers.
Bottom line, soft lines are nice, because you don't even have to handicap to beat them. Just bet the off lines in the direction that they're off (e.g., if the number should be -7, take a 7.5 and lay a 6.5). The old Stardust used to routinely deal Phoenix Suns second-half totals at 107 when the market was 105.5, and the customers would still bet it up! So the play was to wait 'til just before tip, then hit under 107.5 and you could pretty much bet it blind. Even in that big book, though, the limits were $200 or $300, so it really wasn't worth your time unless you were there already.
In the interest of completeness, I'll say that one more very fertile source of soft lines is small Internet sports books. Players who circumvent laws and restrictions, or live outside of the U.S. (where they don't have to), can find lots of soft numbers by jumping from book to book on the Net. If online sports wagering is ever legalized, there will be lot of opportunities for everyone there.
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