There are people that bet sports to have fun. They wager little money and just do it for enjoyment. Then there’s people who bet on sports to make money. Those people should listen up on how to guarantee a profit. Here at Doc’s Sports we have been the experts in the field for 50 years. Here are some notes on guaranteed profit betting.
How to Guarantee a Profit
There are many different ways to guarantee profit in sports betting. The most popular way is to arbitrage, but there’s also strategies called hedging and middling.
Sports Betting Arbitrage:
If you would prefer a risk-free bet, then arbitrage is for you. To do this, you must have two sports books and bet on the opposite sides. Again, you have to use two separate books.
Every site has different lines, and each book will change their lines according to how they want their bets to wagered.
This allows you the opportunity to arb. First, you will bet on the underdog with plus (+) money and put a unit on that bet. Secondly, you would use the positive + money from the fist bet. Then you’d make your second bet, which would be on the favorite.
So again, you’re going to do a positive line + money line for the first bet and then take the negative money line and calculate.
For example, if the San Francisco 49ers were +125 but their opponent, the Seattle Seahawks were -110 at another book, you could get the arbitrage calculator out. Use one unit for the first bet at +125 and then the second bet at -110 you would bet 1.18 units on -110.
If you were to bet 2.18 units on these two games, you would guarantee a profit of .07 units or 3.28 percent guaranteed return on investment.
The reality is, you can’t lose anything when doing this. If you were to bet $10,000 on the first wager and $11,785.71 on the second wager, you’d profit $714.29 without any risk whatsoever.
Of course, some sportsbooks limit you on how much you can wager on a certain game. Make sure that both books allow a wager that high before pressing submit.
If you see two teams at a pick’em price at one book, there’s a chance that you can find plus (+) money on both teams. If you’re able to find plus money on both sides, that is also a riskless bet and a guaranteed profit.
Hedging:
Hedging can be a bit confusing for the beginner. Hedging is a betting strategy where you end up placing a second wager against your first bet when you’re not feeling too great about that first bet. One scenario where a bettor will hedge is in the middle of games and live bet when their feelings shift on a game because of certain outcomes early.
Hedging is also used if a bettor has a parlay with one leg left. Because they’ve hit all of their parlay legs, instead of going all-in, they’ll make sure that they take home at least some profit.
Middling:
Middling is used when live betting to place wagers on different sides of the same game. In the NBA, the game is all about runs. Teams can be up 30 and then up by 10 minutes later. You can middle through live betting and potentially win both sides of your bets.
Before the game, you can take the Los Angeles Lakers to win -10. Then as the game continues and the Lakers up 25, you can take their opponent, for example, the Phoenix Suns at +25.
If the Lakers win by 11 or 24, you’d win both bets. With the Suns +25, and the Lakers -11, whatever outcome happens, guarantees you can’t lose money. If the Lakers only win by 9, you would still win the Suns bet at or around even money.
Middling is best used in NBA or College basketball, because basketball is such a quick paced game where you can see ridiculous jumps in spreads and over/unders. I highly recommend middling in basketball games when live betting if you’re up for the challenge.
Make sure to pick a game where you believe, or your stats show, that there will be multiple runs in a game. Live betting basketball can really help bettors profit with so many different runs in a game.
Doc’s Sports is offering $60 worth of member’s picks absolutely free – no obligation, no sales people – you don’t even have to enter credit card information. You can use this $60 credit any way you please for any handicapper and any sport on Doc’s Sports list of expert sports handicappers. Get $60 worth of premium members’ picks free.
David Sumpter, a professor of Applied Mathematics, has shown how soccer can be dissected and broken down into numbers, patterns and shapes in his book Soccermatics. Having already developed a betting model, he has now written a two-part article for Pinnacle, exploring the notion of a magical betting formula and how mathematics can be used to get an edge in betting.
Betting Profits Formula. For the past couple of weeks, I have been bombarded with emails about some bloke called Joshua Jacobs, every one of my many email addresses were filling up with the usual hard sales bull that appears in your inbox all too frequently.
Place Lay Formula. Zero Risk Trader. Smart Racing Trader. Pro Betfair trader. Retirement Staking Plan. Royal Routine System. Avalanche Staking Plan. Profit Multiplier. Lay Cover Staking. DOWNLOAD VALUE BETTING METHOD FOR FREE. Final profit = lay stake. (1 – commission) Free bet – stake returned (SR) formulas. A) Profit if free bet wins: Profit = free bet value. back odds – lay stake. (lay odds – 1) b) Profit if lay bet wins: Profit = (1 – commission). lay stake; c) To work out the ideal lay stake for even profit, no matter what the result. Place Lay Formula. Zero Risk Trader. Smart Racing Trader. Pro Betfair trader. Retirement Staking Plan. Royal Routine System. Avalanche Staking Plan. Profit Multiplier. Lay Cover Staking. Nunes v Anderson betting odds and predictions.
There is an urban legend of mathematical modelling of soccer matches. It is the legend of the mathematical genius, the Einstein of gambling, who has worked out the formula for beating the bookmakers and winning money. If only, the legend goes, you can find the tips that this person can provide, the source of the magic equation, you can become rich beyond your wildest dreams.
After I published the book Soccermatics last year, a few people seemed to believe I might hold the magical equation. I would get messages on Twitter and emails to my work address asking me if I could help them with tips and advice. I was a professor of mathematics who had studied soccer, maybe I knew the secret?
A simple way to find value in the betting market
In one section of the book, I did manage to beat the bookies. But it wasn’t because I found a magical formula that predicts who will win soccer matches.
The basis of my model was far from complicated. It didn’t come from me working out the strength of the teams based on past performance, advanced metrics, expected goals or anything else.
The way I did it was much simpler. I looked at the odds and found a very small but significant bias in how they were set. Bookmakers and bettors hadn’t paid enough attention to predicting the draw in soccer.
Maybe it is because of the popularity of the Over/Under markets. Maybe it is because bettors don’t like betting on a draw. But, whatever the explanation, it turned out that draws in the Premier League were not properly priced.
- Read: How to beat the bookies in the Over/Under market.
Below is a plot of the real frequency of draws in four seasons of the Premier League (2011/12, 2012/13, 2013/14, 2014/15) and the prediction of draws implied by the bookmaker’s odds.
This figure is created by taking the odds provided by four leading bookmakers (including Pinnacle), converting odds to implied probabilities and then looking at the difference between the probability of a home win and an away win.
It turns out that when two well-matched teams meet (i.e. the probability of a home win is only slightly bigger than the probability of away win) then draws are under-priced (circles above red line). When matches are skewed so there is a strong a favourite (i.e. the probability of one team or the other winning is larger than the other) then draws are over-priced (circles below red line).
Want it made simpler? If two teams are about as good as each other then the draw could be a value bet. If one team is much stronger than the other, don’t bet on the draw (betting on the favourite is normally the smartest move in this case).
Testing out the theory of under-priced draws
That was what I found by plotting the odds. I then took that observation and made some money from it. Below are profits for this model for the 2015/16 season.
I tripled my money over the season. Well, actually I didn’t bet throughout the season. But I had doubled my money by Christmas.
Sports Betting Formula
Soccermatics came out in May 2016, just as the Premier League was coming to a close. I monitored how it went for my model the season after. Here is the result.
Not so good. There was a small profit to be made in the first few weeks, but then it flatlined for the rest of the season. Not losing money is a small achievement in itself, where the odds are in the bookmaker’s favour, but obviously making money is the objective for most bettors.
Lessons learn from using my model
There are four lessons to be learnt from my model.
Firstly, I didn’t make money by creating a magic formula. Although I did write down a single equation that I then used to decide my bets (it is footnote 17 for chapter 12 in the book if you don’t want to read the rest of it) this equation came from an analysis of the odds.
The basis of my model was far from complicated. It didn’t come from me working out the strength of the teams based on past performance, advanced metrics, expected goals or anything else. It came from a small error in how the odds were being set.
If you want to create your own model of sporting outcomes you need to use the odds as the starting point.
Secondly, I wasn’t just lucky. The original model was consistent with the previous four years of bookmaker’s odds. I downloaded my odds from Oddsportal and then double-checked my model against those on football-data.co.uk. I then made a prediction and applied it to the next year and it continued to work.
There is a lot of randomness in betting and it is possible to win for quite a long period of time with luck alone. But this was a long-term trend that was profitable.
Thirdly, nothing lasts forever. In moments of self-aggrandising I like to think that my book led to a market correction. Maybe the traders at Pinnacle and other bookmakers read my book and thought “we’ve been pricing draws wrong. See those odds for Liverpool at home against Manchester United at the weekend….move the draw odds up by 0.1.” That’s all it takes and my small margin disappears.
This is just one explanation, though. Another is that managers realised that in those big matches between equally good teams they should go for the three points (this is also something I look at in the book). There are other explanations too. The fact is, I will never know for sure, but the odds bias I found has gone.
My fourth and final conclusion is: I am a total idiot. I spent three months developing a betting model. I found a way to win. But instead of placing all my free capital on the model, I published a book with the secret in it, only to see the profits disappear.
Yes, I got paid for writing the book. Yes, I have enjoyed talking about soccer and engaging in the analytics community, but the money would have been nice too.
- How to bet on soccer: The ultimate soccer betting guide.
There is no secret equation for predicting the outcome of soccer matches. Not an equation that ignores the odds, in any case. If you want to create your own model of sporting outcomes you need to use the odds as the starting point.
Wisdom of the crowd tells us that the betting market can be hard to beat, but sometimes it makes a few small mistakes. It is these you have to look for.
Betting Profits Formula 2019
In part two of this article I will see if I can find one of those cracks using a combination of an expected goals model and potential biases in recent odds.
Nfl Betting Formulas
If you want to learn more about David Sumpter's work you can follow @Soccermatics on Twitter.