Many people having a bet on the Super Bowl will be regular bettors who have been making picks on football games throughout the 2022-23 NFL regular season and for many years before.

However, the biggest game of the season, which this year will be contested by the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, February 12, will also attract a number of fans to want to place their first ever bet.

The pages of betting odds on a sportsbook website can be quite daunting at first if you’re not used to them and don’t know what all the numbers and symbols mean, so in this article we’ll explain the basics of how to read the Super Bowl odds and what they mean for how much you can win with your bets on the Chiefs vs Eagles game on Sunday.

What are the odds on Super Bowl 57?

We’ll use the money line odds for Super Bowl LVII from FanDuel Sportsbook for our first example. The money line is the most basic bet you can make on any game — a simple pick on which team or player will win. In this case, that means whether the Chiefs or Eagles will win the Super Bowl.

At the time of writing, the Eagles are the -122 favorites for the Super Bowl, with the Chiefs available at +104.

How do betting odds work on the Super Bowl?

American sports betting odds, such as those listed above for the Super Bowl, are based around how much a bettor needs to stake to win $100 or how much they will win if they stake $100. Plus-money odds, such as the +104 shown next to Kansas City for the Super Bowl, will win more money than the original stake if successful, In this case, if you place a $100 stake on the Chiefs to win the Super Bowl and they do, you will make a profit of $104 (receiving $204 back in all, including your stake).

Minus-money odds, such as the -122 shown for the Eagles, require the bettor to stake more than $100 in order to win $100. In this case, to make a $100 profit on an Eagles win, the bettor would need to stake $122 and would receive a total of $222 back — the $100 profit plus their $122 stake. Of course, you don’t have to bet $100 for every bet! Everything is proportional, so if you stake $10 you would receive a 10th of the $100 amount and so on.

Super Bowl against the spread odds explained: What is the Super Bowl 57 spread for Chiefs vs Eagles?

The most popular form of betting on American sports games is on the spread (you may see it called the handicap). Sportsbooks set a ‘number’ for the margin by which they think one team will win the game — in the NFL it can be anything from zero (called a pick ’em) up to 17 points or so. Giving one team a start makes the matchup closer, leading to more competitive betting on both sides.

For Super Bowl 57, the Eagles have been made -1.5 favorites with odds of -110 on Eagles -1.5 or the Chiefs +1.5. What this means is that if you make a spread bet of $11 on the Eagles -1.5, you will make a $10 profit if they win the game by two or more points. If the Chiefs win by any score or lose the game by just 1 point, bettors who take the Chiefs +1.5 would cash their bets, again winning $10 for each $11 staked.

Super Bowl over/under points totals odds explained

Another popular market is the total, or over/under, which is available for most major sports matchups. It is simply a prediction of the number of points that will be scored in the game, with bettors choosing whether they think there will be more points scored than the posted number (over) or fewer points scored (under).

For the Super Bowl, DraftKings Sportsbook has the total set at 50.5 points, with odds of -110 on either over or under. Again, a wager of $11 on over 50.5 would win $10 if there are 51 or more points scored by the Chiefs and the Eagles combined (eg 27-24, 34-28 or 41-14). An $11 bet on under 50.5 would win $10 if 50 or fewer points are scored by the teams (eg 27-21, 34-13 or 17-3).

What other types of betting odds are there on the Super Bowl and what do they mean?

American odds, as the name suggests, are mainly used by American sportsbooks. Outside the United States, fractional or decimal odds are more common, but you may also see odds displayed in those formats on American sportsbooks.

Fractional odds are often used at racetracks in America and are also the most common form of betting odds in the UK. They simply express how much you win per unit staked. Odds such as 2/1, 3/1 and 4/1 and so on show that for a $1 stake at 2/1, for example, you would make a profit of $2, for a $1 stake at 3/1 you would win 3/1 and so on.

These odds are often used for preseason Futures odds, with teams priced at 50/1 to win the Super Bowl or 12/1 to win the AFC.

Decimal odds are more popular in Europe. They are shown as a single number, which is the amount a winning bet would return for a $1 bet. In this case a bet at +200 in American odds, or 2/1 in fractional odds would be shown as 3.00 in decimal odds, Similarly, +500 is the same as 5/1 and 6.00 and so on. For minus-money bets, such as a -200 favorite in American odds, that would be 1/2 in fractional odds and 1.50 in decimal odds. Once you familiarize yourselves with the odds for a while it will all become more natural and is much easier to understand than it might seem at first!