Moneyline Betting in Ice Hockey: How It Works and Where to Find Best Odds in the UK

The first time I tried to explain ice hockey moneyline betting to a friend who only knew football markets, he looked at me like I’d started speaking a different language. No draw. No 1X2. Just two teams, one winner, and a set of decimal odds that tells you everything you need to know about where the bookmaker thinks the game is going. Once that clicks, moneyline betting becomes one of the cleanest, most intuitive wagers in sport.

The UK market has grown significantly for NHL and Elite Ice Hockey League coverage over the past few years, and moneyline is the foundation of almost everything else. If you don’t understand how to read and evaluate a moneyline, the puck line and totals markets won’t make much sense either. So let’s start here.

How the Moneyline Works in Ice Hockey

One question I get constantly from new hockey bettors is why there’s no draw option. In football, you pick from 1, X or 2. In ice hockey, you pick from two. That’s it. Every game in the NHL must produce a winner—if the score is level after sixty minutes of regulation, there’s overtime, and if that doesn’t resolve it, a shootout. Someone always wins.

The moneyline is simply a bet on which team wins the game, including whatever overtime or shootout is required to settle it. If you back the Toronto Maple Leafs on the moneyline and they win in a shootout, you win your bet. That simplicity is the market’s biggest selling point.

UK bookmakers price moneyline bets in decimal odds. A favourite might be priced at 1.60, meaning a £10 stake returns £16 total (£6 profit). An underdog at 2.50 returns £25 on a £10 stake. The relationship between the two prices reflects the bookmaker’s implied probability for each outcome, with their margin built in on top.

NHL matches regularly see favourites priced anywhere from 1.40 to 1.80 for straightforward home games, while genuine upsets can push underdogs to 3.00 or beyond. The range is wider than in many other sports because a single elite goaltender can shift probability dramatically—something I’ll come back to when discussing how to evaluate these markets.

Two-Way vs Three-Way Hockey Markets

Here’s something that catches people out early on. Some bookmakers, particularly when covering European league hockey like the KHL or Scandinavian leagues, offer what’s called a three-way or 1X2 market. This is regulation time only—so the draw (X) applies only to 60 minutes of play, and overtime is excluded from that result.

For NHL betting at UK bookmakers, you’ll almost always see two-way markets. The game will produce a winner one way or another, and the moneyline reflects that full-game result. Three-way markets do appear for NHL on some platforms as an alternative market type, priced off regulation time alone, but they sit alongside the standard two-way line rather than replacing it.

Why does this distinction matter? Because backing an NHL favourite on a three-way market at evens, expecting them to cover the regulation win, gives you very different risk to taking that same favourite on the standard two-way moneyline. I’ve seen bettors lose regulation-time wagers that the market effectively “settled” before overtime, despite their team winning the game overall. Always check which market you’re in before placing.

The EIHL presents a slightly different picture. British ice hockey does have overtime and shootouts, and UK bookmakers generally offer two-way moneyline markets for Elite league games in the same format as the NHL. EIHL coverage varies—not every platform lists all nine teams—but where the market exists, the structure mirrors what you’d see for North American hockey.

Reading Decimal Odds on a Hockey Moneyline

Nine years of doing this has taught me that the single most underrated skill in hockey betting is converting odds to implied probability quickly in your head. You don’t need to be a mathematician. The formula is straightforward: divide 1 by the decimal odds to get the implied probability as a fraction, then multiply by 100 for a percentage.

A team priced at 1.80 implies a 55.6% win probability (1 ÷ 1.80 = 0.556). An underdog at 2.20 implies 45.5%. Add those together and you get 101.1%—the extra 1.1% is the bookmaker’s margin baked into the line.

This matters because your edge in hockey betting comes from finding situations where your own probability assessment differs meaningfully from the bookmaker’s implied one. If you believe a team has a 60% chance of winning, but the market is pricing them at only 55%, that’s a positive expectation bet. Over hundreds of wagers, consistently finding those gaps is what separates profitable bettors from losing ones.

In the NHL, where the sheer volume of games—the league attracted over 23 million attendees in the 2024/25 season alone—generates enormous amounts of data, there’s plenty of raw material for informed probability assessments. Goal-scoring rates, save percentages, power play efficiency, and rest schedules all feed into evaluating whether a bookmaker’s line represents value.

Where UK Bookmakers Price NHL Moneylines

Not all UK platforms are equal when it comes to NHL coverage. The major licensed bookmakers operating in Britain generally list primetime games—the marquee fixtures on a given night—with competitive two-way lines. Where they diverge is in coverage depth and odds quality for lesser-watched matchups.

Margins on NHL moneylines at UK bookmakers typically sit between 4% and 7% depending on the platform and the fixture’s profile. High-profile games in the Eastern Conference tend to attract tighter margins than Western Conference games that start at 02:00 GMT, simply because trading volume is lower through the night and bookmakers price conservatively.

For EIHL betting, the picture is thinner. A handful of UK operators list Sheffield Steelers, Belfast Giants, Nottingham Panthers and some of the other nine clubs, but the coverage isn’t universal and the margins reflect lower liquidity. The tradeoff is that less liquid markets are sometimes where the sharpest value lives—bookmakers who set EIHL lines with less data behind them occasionally leave exploitable gaps for bettors who follow the league closely.

One thing that’s always worth checking before you place: whether the platform you’re using lists the full market you want, not just a highlight selection. Some bookmakers will show a “match winner” for a game but only price the two-way line for prime fixtures, reverting to a three-way format for others. That’s worth a two-second confirmation check before you commit a stake.

If you want to move beyond the basic match winner into more nuanced hockey markets, understanding the puck line is the logical next step. For a full breakdown of how the hockey spread works and when to back the favourite or the underdog at minus or plus 1.5 goals, see our puck line betting guide.

Prepared by the Best Ice Hockey Betting Sites editorial staff.