The loudest complaint I heard from bettors this week was not about a line move, a bad beat, or a book cutting someone's limits. It was about a label. Novig swapped its entire board from American odds to implied probability, and a lot of good bettors who could read -150 in their sleep opened the app, saw 60%, and felt like they had been handed a menu in a language they half remember from school. I understand the reaction. I also think it fades faster than people expect, because the percentage is not a translation of the price. It is the price, and it tells you more than the moneyline ever did.
I covered why the switch happened and the full translation table in Thursday's piece on the format change. This one is about what to do with the number now that it is there: how to read 60% the way a trader reads it, the three mistakes almost everyone makes in the first week, and a ten-second check you can run on any Novig matchup that used to take three conversions on a sportsbook. The habit that ties it together, the one that makes the old format feel like the clumsy one, is at the end.
The Quick Answer
Novig shows 60% where it used to show -150 because the two are the same price written two ways: a contract that pays $1 if the New York Yankees win costs 60 cents (a walkthrough number, not a live quote), which is both the market's probability and your cost per dollar of payout. Nothing about the game, the math, or your edge changed, only the label. The payout arithmetic behind that number, the three day-one mistakes, a 14-row table keyed to the moneylines you already remember, and the two-sided matchup check are below.
Free: The Weekly PM Market Brief
The 8-model panel's graded record, the week's biggest market-vs-model gaps, and what's spiking next. One email, Sundays.
Unsubscribe anytime, one click. We never share your email.
What 60% On The Novig Board Actually Says
Start with the mechanics, because everything else follows from them. On an exchange like Novig, every position is a contract that pays $1 if the outcome happens and nothing if it does not. The number on the board is the price of that contract in cents. Kalshi prices work the same way, and regulated event-contract markets generally center on contracts priced between $0 and $1.
So 60% on the Yankees, a number I am using for the walkthrough rather than a live quote, means a Yankees contract costs 60 cents. Put $100 into it and you hold roughly 167 contracts. If New York wins, those contracts pay $1 each, so you collect about $167, a profit of about $67 on $100 risked. Run that through the old label and it is -150: risk $150 to win $100, the identical ratio. The other side of the same market sits near 40%. A 40-cent contract turns $100 into 250 contracts and $250 back if the underdog comes through, which is the old +150.
Here is why I have stopped translating. The percentage is doing two jobs at once. It is the market's probability that the Yankees win, and it is your cost per dollar of payout. American odds only did the second job, and did it with a sign flip and two different formulas depending on which side of even money you were on. If you want the formulas anyway, the implied probability guide has both directions, and the odds converter handles American, decimal, and percent in one box. But the point of the new board is that you should need them less, not more.
Three Mistakes Bettors Make In Week One
All three show up in the first week, and the first one is the easiest to make.
Reading the bigger number as the bigger payout. A lifetime of American odds trains you to see a bigger absolute number as a bigger deal. On a percentage board it runs the other way: the higher the percentage, the more you pay and the less you make. Seventy-five percent is the old -300, a three-to-one favorite, and it pays 33 cents on the dollar. Twenty-five percent is the old +300 and pays three dollars on the dollar. Once you anchor on "percentage equals cost," the confusion disappears, but for the first few days your eyes will lie to you.
Expecting the -110 reflex to hold. On a sportsbook, a point spread sits at -110 on both sides almost by definition, so bettors learn to treat 52.4% as the price of a coin flip. On Novig there is no book setting that price. Two sides of a matchup should sit much closer to 100% than a sportsbook pair, because a peer-to-peer exchange has no bookmaker margin built into the number, though the gap between what buyers bid and sellers ask, thin liquidity, and order-type fees can still push the cost of buying both sides a little above 100 (Novig's published fee schedule lists no fee on pre-game straight trades placed in the app or on the web and none on orders that rest in the book, while live straight orders that take a resting price carry a separately stated fee and the parlay fee is built into the quoted price; how money moves on Novig covers the rest). A spread at 50% and 50%, or 50 and 51, is not a sign that something is off. It is what an even market looks like without the juice, and treating it as suspicious is a sportsbook habit talking.
Converting every price back to American before deciding. This one feels productive and is the most expensive of the three. Translation is a crutch, and a crutch that hides the actual question. The old label answers "what does this pay?" The percentage answers "how likely does the market think this is?" That second question is the one that finds value, and the first only tells you the size of the ticket. If your process starts by converting 60% to -150 and then asking whether -150 feels right, you are grading a feeling. If it starts by asking whether the Yankees really win this game 60 times out of 100, you are grading a price.
The anchor that fixes all three: the percentage is what you pay per dollar of payout. Higher means pricier, two sides should sum near 100, and the question is "how often does this happen," not "what does this pay."
The Moneylines You Remember, In Novig's Language
Thursday's table ran from percentage to American odds. This one runs the other direction, keyed to the sportsbook prices you already carry in your head, because for the next few weeks that is the direction your brain will translate. Percent is what Novig shows. Decimal is the odds form we use for exchange prices when an odds format is needed at all.
| Moneyline You Remember | Novig shows | Decimal odds | $100 returns |
|---|---|---|---|
| -300 | 75.0% | 1.33 | $133 |
| -250 | 71.4% | 1.40 | $140 |
| -200 | 66.7% | 1.50 | $150 |
| -150 | 60.0% | 1.67 | $167 |
| -135 | 57.4% | 1.74 | $174 |
| -120 | 54.5% | 1.83 | $183 |
| -110 | 52.4% | 1.91 | $191 |
| +100 | 50.0% | 2.00 | $200 |
| +120 | 45.5% | 2.20 | $220 |
| +150 | 40.0% | 2.50 | $250 |
| +200 | 33.3% | 3.00 | $300 |
| +250 | 28.6% | 3.50 | $350 |
| +300 | 25.0% | 4.00 | $400 |
| +400 | 20.0% | 5.00 | $500 |
Favorites convert as |odds| ÷ (|odds| + 100), dropping the minus sign first, so -150 is 150 ÷ 250; underdogs convert as 100 ÷ (odds + 100), so +150 is 100 ÷ 250. Decimal odds are 100 divided by the percentage, and the last column is the total returned on a $100 position including the stake, before any exchange fee.
The row I keep pointing people to is the -110 row, because it is the one that exposes the difference between the two boards: a sportsbook spread at -110 both ways is 52.4% plus 52.4%, or 104.8% combined, and that extra 4.8 points is the book's margin, the overround, which works out to about 4.6 cents of every dollar wagered if the money splits evenly across both sides. Thursday's piece walks through that margin in full. What matters here is that it hides inside a pair of odds that look symmetrical and sits in plain sight in a sum, which is the whole idea behind the next section.
A Worked Example: The Ten-Second Matchup Check
Every Novig matchup now gives you a check that used to require three conversions and a calculator. Add the two prices you would actually pay to buy each side.
Take a hypothetical MLB game where Novig shows the favorite at 60% and the underdog at 41%, not the tidy 40% from the walkthrough, because the two sides of a live order book rarely sum to exactly 100. The sum is 101%. That one point above 100 is the two-sided cost of the market at the prices you can actually hit, the exchange's version of a cost, and on a well-traded game it should be small. Now hold the same game against a sportsbook pair of -150 and +130. The favorite converts to 60% and the underdog to 43.5%, for a combined 103.5%. Same game, same favorite price, and the sportsbook is charging two and a half points more across the pair, entirely on the underdog side. Nobody would spot that from -150 and +130. Anybody can spot it from 60 and 43.5.
The sum tells you how much a market costs to trade. It does not tell you whether either side is a good price, and that is the second half of the check. For that I put Novig's percentage next to the fair number for the same game on our live odds screen, which lines up every major sportsbook's price on the same game and shows the de-vigged number, the price with the book's margin stripped back out, beside them. If Novig's executable percentage, after any fee on the order type, sits below the de-vigged market probability for the same outcome, the exchange is offering the better price. That comparison is two percentages side by side. On the old board it was three American numbers and a sign flip, and I know plenty of people who skipped it because of the friction. The odds screen and the fair-price comparison start with a free week trial, and if you want a starting point for tonight's board, our free expert picks post the price attached to every play.
Why The Board Changed
I will keep this short because Thursday's piece covers it in full. Novig's exchange entity, Ludlow Exchange, LLC, holds a Designated Contract Market designation from the CFTC, the federal agency that oversees derivatives and now event-contract prediction markets, granted June 16, 2026, per the CFTC's designation record. A regulated event-contract exchange trades contracts priced between $0 and $1, so a probability board is the exchange-native way to show the price, and it is the convention Kalshi's board uses today. Going back would mean relabeling a federally regulated contract as a sportsbook price, which is why I would not wait around for the moneyline to return. How Novig works underneath walks through the order-book mechanics, and what separates an exchange from a sportsbook explains why the two have different reasons to show different numbers.
The practical read is that this format may become more common if more sports platforms move under event-contract frameworks, so the useful skill is shopping between a percentage venue and an American-odds book without a calculator. Here is how that goes for me. I check the underdog side first, because that is where the sportsbook pair in the example above carried its extra two and a half points, and it is where an exchange price most often beats the book. Then I size the gap. A point or two between Novig's percentage and the de-vigged number is the spread and any fee on the order type, not an edge, and I leave it alone. When the gap after costs runs wider than that, the exchange has a real price on the board, and the position gets taken there instead of at the book. The time I skip the check is the time I pay the sportsbook's full underdog premium for a price that was cheaper two apps over. Kalshi vs sportsbook odds, and how the margin grows as the juice moves, is the arithmetic behind why that check pays.
The One Habit To Take With You
Here is the promise from the top of the page, and it is a sequence, not a philosophy. The next time you open a Novig matchup, run the ten-second check before you look at the favorite: add the two prices you would pay, and if the sum sits more than a point or two above 100, the market is expensive to trade and you are done. If it is tight, check the underdog side against the de-vigged number first, because that is where the sportsbook pair in the example above carried its extra two and a half points, and it is where the exchange most often has the better price. Only then decide, and decide in the board's own language: does this outcome happen this many times out of 100?
That question was always the right one. American odds made it easy to skip, because they answered a different question first and let you feel like you had done the work. The percentage board asks it for you every time you look at it. That is the trade Novig made this week, and once the label stops feeling foreign, it is a trade in the bettor's favor.
Age minimums are set by each platform rather than by the regulator: Novig requires users to be 21 or older, while Kalshi, another CFTC-regulated exchange, admits traders at 18 and up. Availability depends on your state, and several states have challenged sports event contracts in court, so confirm eligibility in the app before funding an account. Every price on an exchange is a risk, not a promise.
- Novig Odds Format Change: Why Your Moneyline Is Now A Percentage
- How Does Novig Work? Sports-Only Exchange Explained
- ProphetX Vs Novig: Which Betting Exchange Wins? (2026)
- NoVig Deposits And Withdrawals: What To Expect Getting Money In And Out
- Novig Sign Up Bonus August 2026: Deposit $10, Get $25
These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Novig is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange; Novig requires users to be 21+, other CFTC exchanges admit traders at 18+, and availability varies by state. This page contains commercial content, and OddsShopper may be compensated for some of the links on it.
