How Sports Betting Works

Sports betting is interesting to everyone who likes to bet and who enjoys sports. The bookmakers are the businesses that offer odds to customers in return for accepting their wagers and paying out on customer wins. They are businesses and customers should not be confused into thinking they are obliged to accept a bet. They have the option to refuse to accept that a bet be placed at any time and usually bar any customers they think are constant winners at good stakes.

Odds are set by the bookmaker’s odds compilers based on their mathematical belief of an actual event taking place. Bookmakers then alter the odds so that they will make a profit no matter what the outcome overall. Because of this attempt by the bookmakers to always keep things in their favour mathematically customers must look for value, or the occasions where the odds are in their favour, to show a long term profit. It is not easy.

There are many things which can cause odds to alter in sports betting. They are, human error, weight of money, perception changes and media coverage of something that would affect the result. Often a combination of these factors cause a price change. For example, let’s say that just before a game against Man Utd Arsenal suffer the loss of Cesc Fabregas and Robin Van Persie through injury. People would rush to bet on Man Utd now that Arsenal is weakened. The perception of the result has changed so the bookmakers would shorten the odds offered for Man Utd quickly. Human error when a odds compiler makes a mistake is very rare and usually checks are made to avoid this resulting in losses for the bookmakers.

Sports betting is the constant search for value and a mano-a-mano battle between variable change, perception and the bookmaker’s odds compilers statistical skills.

Weight of money on one particular result can cause an opportunity for the punter. In Darts let’s assume that I play Joe Bloggs and we are both priced at 1.85 (the odds should be 2.00 but the bookmakers always keep it in their favour). My family decide I am a good bet to win and club together to bet £1000 on me to win. Further large bets on me cause the bookie to consider my price to win needs to be changed. They need to take some more money on the other player to balance their book so they reduce my price to 1.65. This reduces the return a bet on me would collect making it less attractive. The bookie increases the price of my opponent to around 2.10. Anyone betting on Joe to win suddenly gets value because in reality we have an even chance to win being equally good at Darts. More bets will therefore (the bookmaker hopes) be placed on Joe Bloggs to win because of the price change.

Consider Phil Taylor’s odds to win any darts match; you rarely get over 1.07 for him in any match because he is so far ahead of his opponents in terms of his skill at Darts and professional record. Your fight for value is normally found away from the big favourites where pricing decisions are more marginal for the odds compiler.

A good way of trying to grab some of the value is participating in live betting as the odds change constantly and depending on the action you may spot value in real time before the odds compiler changes the odds back into the safe zone for the bookies. This fast and furious way of conducting sports betting is growing in popularity all the time.

By Malcolm Clarke