Many people think that professional sports bettors simply determine matches’ endings very precisely and make a lot of money in a short period of time. But that is not true at all. You simply cannot know the outcome of the match. No matter how much you know about the teams, about the players, etc., you cannot determine the ending precisely. That is the very reason why it is interesting to watch sports, isn’t it?
We’ve all seen incredible things happening in sports no one could think of. Spectacular game-ending full-court shots in basketball, players hitting birds in baseball (It did indeed happen – watch here).
It’s all a part of the probability theory – the one we learned in school. No one can beat it. Some gamblers think they beat it after winning 15 bets in a row, but it is just a drop in the sea in the long term.
You can get a group of monkeys and let them bet random bets with 1.9 odds for a week. I guarantee that several of them will win most of their bets and make a huge profit by the end of the week. But does that mean you would buy betting tips from a monkey?
Now let’s get to the point. You can only make a profit long term by betting value bets. A value bet is a bet where the probability of a given outcome is greater than the bookmaker’s odds reflect. Simply put, when value betting you will be placing bets that have a larger chance of winning than implied by the bookmakers odds. This means you will have an edge over the bookmaker in the long run. Let’s take a coin toss for example. Both probabilities that it will either land heads or tails are equal – 50%. The bookmaker gives you 1.95 odds for both tails and heads outcomes. They also think these probabilities are both 50% and the 0.05 is the bookmaker’s margin. They make money with it.
You can guess however you want, you can take the wind into account, you can take the coin tosser’s experience into account – in the long run, you will win 50% of these bets and you will lose 50%. The odds are 1.95, which means if you place 10€ on 100 of these types of bets, you will be at -25€ loss (10€*50*1.95-10€*100). You are in the negative because your bets didn’t have any value to them.
Now let’s look into it from the other side. The same coin is being tossed, but now the bookmaker gives you 2.1 odds for it to land on tails and 1.80 for it to land on heads. Perhaps they miscalculated the odds. So you bet on the tails outcome with 2.1 odds. You do that 100 times with 10€. You lose 50 bets and win 50 of them. And now you are at 50€ profit (10€*50*2.1-10€*100). You are in profit because you bet on value bets. That is how you make money in sports betting. It is much more complicated in sports than it is in a coin toss, of course. That is why 99% of all sports bettors lose their money in the long run.
That is why all of these predictions with analyses like “The team A is better than the team B, because yesterday they won against the team C by a big margin and they also won the championship last year. That is why we should bet on the team A.” are worthless. They are indefferent from the random bets the monkeys would make. That is why at bara.bet we prioritise the data science so much.
