The Secret Strategy to Beat Online Bookmakers with Betting

 The Secret Strategy for Betting That Beats Online Bookmakers

When two teams play soccer, the bookmakers will set odds that each team will win, lose, or draw. A lot of people may bet on an outcome that is not related to the odds. For example, a team might be more popular or less popular than expected. The bookmaker can expect a huge payout in this case.

Bookmakers can hedge their bets with more favorable odds for the opposite outcome. They can attract bets that will cover at least part of the losses.

Kaunitz, co. say this creates an opportunity for anyone who can spot it. The secret is to consistently spot odds favoring the punter, rather than the bookie.

Their approach is very straightforward. The bookies assume that they are experts at setting odds and that prices they give are accurate representations of real probabilities of winning, drawing, or losing.

This is because the average of all the odds offered to them by all bookies, which is a form of wisdom from the crowd, can be used to measure these probabilities. This calculates the average odds. Kaunitz & co. claim that this is a remarkable reflection of the actual probabilities.

It's then simple to look at all the odds offered and to identify the outliers. Kaunitz, co. then determine the odds of outlying events being favorable. If the odds are favorable, the bet will pay off in the long term.

Kaunitz, along with his team, did exactly this. They created a Web crawler to collect odds from online gambling companies for soccer games across the globe. They calculated the average odds and found any outliers. Then they worked out whether a wager would favor them.

Before investing any money, researchers tested the idea with historical data over 10 years. The data included the closing odds of 479,440 soccer game played between 2005 and 2015. This simulation was successful in paying out 44 percent of the times and yielded a yield of 3.5% over a 10-year period. "For an imaginary stake at $50 per bet this corresponds to an equivalent profit in $98,865 across 56 435 bets," the authors state.

The important question is: Could this result have been luck? Could they have just been lucky? They compared their results to 2,000 simulations, in which they placed random bets on identical games. In this case, the bets paid 39% of the time and returned -3.2%, which equals a loss of $93,000.

The team was then able to calculate the probability that their first result had been a fluke. "The probability of obtaining an increase in return than or equal $98,865 for 56,435 bets using random bet strategies is less that 1 in a million," they state.

Kaunitz & co had every reason to believe their method would work out in the real world. However, there was one problem. Normal punters can't always place bets on the closing odds. These odds can differ significantly from those given in the lead-up to a particular game.

Kaunitz, along with others, decided to simulate the game. "We decided to do a more realistic simulation where we placed bets at odds that were available between 1 and 5 hours before each start of each game," they said.

This is the reason why the odds of winning are not publically available. So the team developed a bot that collected odds from all the major betting sites from September 2015 to February 2016. This data set was used to test their approach.

The results were even better. Their bets were successful 47.6% of all the time. They also earned a 9.9% return. Their strategy would have yielded $34,932 in profit if each bet had been $50. This is across 6,994 bets, they claim.

Surprisingly, a random strategy for betting on the same data produced a return rate of 0.2 percent and a profit amount of $825. It could be because of intense competition between online gambling companies that offer more favorable odds to attract punters. Useful Gambling Tips, Tricks & Secrets