Vigorish, in sports betting, is effectively the sportsbooks charge or commission for taking your bet. The 'vig' is really no different to a moneylender's handling fee or a stock broker's transaction charge.
On a standard pointspread price of -110 (also expressed as 10/11 or 1.91) the customer will have to bet $11.00 to win $10.00.
So if you take a rudimentary example of two bettors each betting $11.00 in the pointspread market on an NFL game. One bettor goes for Team A, the other for Team B. The sportsbook takes a total of $22.00 from the two customers.
For the purposes of simplicity we will take out the possibility of a 'push' (tie) in this example. We know that one bettor will have to win and the other bettor will have to lose. The winning bettor will receive back his $11.00 stake and his winning profit of $10.00. The losing bettor forfeits his stake of $11.00 which goes into the sportsbook's coffers.
The sportsbook ends up with $1.00 in commission / profit. Naturally the higher the stakes the more commission the sportsbook will receive. $110.00 bets would provide $10.00 in commission, $1100.00 bet would provide $100.00 in commission.
With money coming in from thousands of customers, many of them betting on more than one game, you can see how the sportsbook can turn a decent profit. The sportsbook will however need to 'manage his book' so as to take even action on both teams. It does this by adjusting the odds or the pointspread to attract customers to one side of the book or the other.
The sportsbook rarely, in fact, ends up with a precisely even weight of bets on both sides/teams in a matchup - but as long as the proportion of action is good, then the sportsbook will make its profit.
It is not the losing player that pays the 'vig' to the sportsbook. The losing bettor simply loses his bet, period. The winning player pays the 'vig' from his winnings.
In effect you don't 'win money from the sportsbook' but win money from other losing players. The sportsbook is the broker and it is in partnership with the sportsbook that you have won your money from another player / other players.
So when you see a tout or picks service advertisement stating: "We took down the Man (sportsbook or bookie) again!" or "We gave the bookmakers a hammering last night..." you can be pretty sure that they don't understand how sportsbooks operate or, perhaps, do know and simply wish to grab business from novice pospective clients by whipping them up into a betting frenzy.
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