Recently, the venerable Two Plus Two magazine met an untimely demise. It rarely had sports betting content anymore, but since I had a long standing relationship with them, that’s where I chose to put out my first few articles on sports betting as I uncovered the secrets about expected growth optimization and the benefits of hedging. This exercise eventually led me to formalize a quantity called the “swap equivalent,” and soon after to work out how to use it to calculate an actual cost to variance. Since the 2p2 magazine is no longer operational, I’ll post this article here for now so other truth seekers can see how I derived the swap equivalent. Read on and enjoy!