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Dead Heat Reductions

Dead Heat Reductions And You: Why It’s Important To Know Your Sportsbook

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  • Dead Heat Reductions are a policy that some sportsbooks implement to limit liabilities.
  • They can cause winning bets to have reduced odds in some cases.
  • It’s important for bettors to be familiar with these policies when line shopping.

LAS VEGAS - Online sportsbooks are some of the most unique businesses in the world, and their job is to part their customers from their money.

However, they generally don’t want to actually make the customers feel as though they’re being used or cheated.

That said, it’s important, when signing up at an online sportsbook, to make sure you’re familiar with all of their policies.

This is especially important when those policies apply to the wagers you plan to place.

Fans of online betting content creator Matt Perrault found this out the hard way after the end of the Players Championship.

Perrault posted noting that multiple listeners of his had seen their payouts on a winning wager reduced because of something called a dead heat reduction.

Dead heat reductions, or DHR’s, are when a sportsbook decides to limit their liability in the case of multiple players finishing in the same position.

In this case, there were bettors who wagered on Jon Rahm to finish in the top 10 of the tournament, which he did, finishing tied for ninth.

However, because there were a large number of players who finished tied for ninth in the tournament, online sportsbooks like DraftKings, FanDuel, and PointsBet reduced their payouts to wagerers who bet on those players to finish in the top 10.

Basically, these betting sites saw that there were more than 10 players technically in the top 10, and took the opportunity to limit their liabilities according to their DHR policy.

This DHR policy caused multiple players to message Perrault asking why, and it’s notable that a betting professional was just as taken aback by this as many of our amateur readers are likely to be.

This policy, of course, did not just apply to Rahm, but to any golfer who got a finish wherein they were tied.

This is a fairly ridiculous policy in the context of golf, where one is specifically wagering on an individual performance.

It’s impossible to predict whether your correct prediction of an individual performance will end up being scuffed by the fact that several other golfers tied with your chosen pick.

Perrault also took the time to note that multiple other sportsbooks do not do this, from the Las Vegas sportsbooks to books like BetMGM.

In effect, there are two lessons here.

The first is to read the rules posted on the sportsbooks, because there will be little things like this that end up mattering a lot.

The second is to take those rules into account when choosing an online sportsbook to wager on.

If someone finds themselves line shopping on a bet for Jon Rahm to finish in the top 10, and they’re choosing between a sportsbook that does this and a sportsbook that doesn’t, that should absolutely enter their calculations.

Golf betting fans are most at risk for DHR problems, but in theory, any sport in which there are large fields, ties can occur, and bettors can wager on individual finishes could have this problem.

Online sports bettors should make sure to protect themselves and to take these potential problems into account.