[Performify]

My point is/was: Balanced action is a myth, like the sasquatch or the female orgasm.

It's a common misconception. The casual punter thinks "oh, these lines are set so that half the money is on one side and half on the other". Its just not true -- the lines aren't these magical balancing points where it works out like that.

Yes, it's the holy grail. Every book would love it, but its pretty much impossible. True balanced action (literally 50% of the money on Team A at -7, 50% of the money on Team B at +7) doesn't really exist. Books don't effectively hang a line that will get 50% of the money on either side. They can't. The sharps and the public aren't these organized forces that work in equal but opposite perfect harmony. Its not that much of a science. The lines are set, and market forces push the lines to move.

Books certainly shift lines to adjust their risk and exposure on games, what I referred to as their risk profile or their position on a game. But its not done because "ok we have 48% action on this game and we need to get it to 50%".

It's "we have too much action on this side and aren't comfortable with our current position of winning 3M if Indy loses and losing 1.5M if Indy wins, so we need to sell off some Indy / shift the line to bring the risk to the book down to our comfortable risk level of 1M for this game". A book may have 80% of the money on one side of a line and be happy with it. Or they may have 50%-50% and be unhappy because they intended to take a position and shade.

It's especially this way in the trenches at the lower level independents. Your local guy may have 90/10 on a game featuring the home team. He may shade some of that risk up the chain to a larger bookie (or these days, online) but he's not usually going to balance to 50/50. He's going to depend on the fact (usually) that his customers can't beat the -110 line long term and while he might have a big busto weekend here and there, he's going to beat them down over time because they can't pick 54%+ winners but keep betting against the -110.

If that local guy was in Indy in 2006 and booking a lot of homers, he got killed. A lot of regional guys went under last year in the great BSP Uprising -- they couldn't fade the huge public favorites covering with such great frequency, and many were not smart enough to offload enough risk -- "adjusting their risk profile" so to speak.

Ultimately part of this is a semantic difference. "balancing the action to reduce risk" is something that happens using that terminology -- you could say the guy moving from 90/10 to 75/25 is "balancing the action" in that he's bringing it closer to a theoretical balance he will likely never reach. It's just that the final state of true balance just never (almost never) truly hits that 50/50 nirvana. The position could be 55/45 or 60/40 or 51/49 but

Edit to add: All ^ based on my own experience inside and around the industry, obv. not the authoritative voice on this despite the name in green. Happy to get someone else's opinion if they disagree...

-P