Topic: Odds, units advantage | Sportsbook | +36315 units - page 19. (Read 39960 times)

Whoops almost forgot my bet, we lost last night but another double sounds good for me and this time on PSG to maintain their grip on the group, against City. Hey we did it once already no?

Game starts in 5 mins!

200 units on PSG to WIN against City @6.51. Other odds: 5.90
Units advantage: 61
Bet ID: 619e7d6a6247094079c03cc3

^ Our lives on gambling is probably a chockful of theories that may never get the chance to be put to the test;)

Tonight there is only one match worth betting on I would say and that's Juventus to win against Chelsea (again). Yes, they've already qualified, so will be expected to field a weaker team. But yes, also, Chelsea have actually been carrying a highly unsustainable xG ratio and they will find problems again I think, even at home.

So let's do a bit of a risk and do double stakes.

200 units at Fairlay on Juventus to WIN vs Chelsea @6.77. Other odds: 6.30
Units advantage: 47

Well, this is more of a theoretical question (since I do not gamble for large amounts), but when compared with traditional bookmakers (where you can even bet several million dollars in one bet), then the liquidity is lower. However, 0.5 BTC is enough for me anyway  , but this does not mean that I have no fantasies  about the future where I could develop a "system" and make income from bets the main source.
In such a fantasy future, the issue of liquidity is critically important. Firstly, because any advantage that a better can get will always be minimal (like as bookmakers have a minimal advantage over players now), therefore, for any at least some noticeable income, more or less large bets must be made and made often. Secondly, even if it is possible to place such bets, they should not kill liquidity for obvious reasons. Accordingly, this is another factor in favor of looking for more liquidity.
Remark: this is just theoretical reasoning, while I have not developed any profitable system, unfortunately 

I don't really pay much attention as the markets I bet on generally have 0.5 BTC liquidity, and the larger ones often 1 BTC plus. Sure, I don't think it's that big but you're not individually limited and free to match ALL the BTC available. If you're like me and place beer change bets, and maybe the max bet you do is a few mBTC, I doubt you'll ever have a problem.

Also, you're free to make your own markets and put your liquidity down, advertise the market and get someone else to take you up on the offer (on chat).

So I guess the more important question for you is: what do you mean by "very large"?

I looked at Fairlay a little and it seemed to me that the liquidity there is not very large right? That is, if I want to make large bets, then I can only do this on the most popular events. This question refers to "living from betting" - it is very difficult to do this if the opportunity to place the best bets is limited by little liquidity, and the rest of the bookmakers are much less profitable.

PSG were never going to lose, were they? If you've followed my thread long enough then you know I have to put a customary "City lose" bet. Rafa Benitez has done it before with Newcastle, he actually has a slightly better team in Everton!

So a very simple 100 units at Fairlay on Everton to WIN vs Man City @18.00. Other odds: 16.50
Units advantage: 150



I promise you, I don't. The moment I believe I can make a living from this and start betting more than silly money or beer pocket change, I get emotional and dumb, and then make bets I shouldn't.

I wish I actually only bet like I post in this thread, then I can probably call myself a super tipster, but one day the luck will run out, I am comfortable with that

But I like that the thread has entertained people in the past and present, and maybe it teaches myself a thing or two about betting haha. And to answer why it seems I spend a lot of time here: I spend about an hour or two almost daily on public transport, sometimes even 3 hours on certain days. It's too bumpy or noisy to read, or do anything else much but I spend it on this forum =)

God, you're everywhere ... I'm starting to think that you make money by placing bets. 

How else to explain deep knowledge in football, in betting and steep results in the pool? (not to mention this thread).

Man, if this is not so, then I sincerely envy you that you can spend so much free time on your hobbies, this is really cool)).

Yeah, I think now I will take breaks on internationals, they've never really been my strong point and big upsets are unlikelier to happen, not that I'm any smarter with league football but I feel like the upsets are still better value there and more likely.

I was tinkering with Newcastle 2-2 draw which I saw you predicted, but took it down to 1-1 and paid the price of 0.5 points haha. Wolves nice to see Jimenez score but totally surprised Hammers couldn't get a goal.

Watford v United was barely 7/1 but I should have selected them as well for this thread, I bet on them at Stake, which pays out if Watford score first regardless of outcome, but they haven't scored first and lost this season

You have been lazy lately, I forgot this thread even existed

Nice hit on Augsburg upset, I went with a safer option of BTTS which was enough for me. Like it when it passe nice and early like yesterday.

I am on goals today again, I feel like both derby matches in Italia should have lots of goals as well as Newcastle and Wolves games. BTTS in all of them for me.

Finally. League football is back. And I neglected to post my opening bet here last night (Augsburg upset against Bayern @15/1) but that's okay because we can also open with a Nantes win against PSG tonight instead. Unlikely to hit given all the records H2H and form but I feel like anything is possible when we come back after internationals.

100 units at Fairlay on Nantes to WIN vs PSG @15.1. Other odds: 14.1

Manchester United are City's opponents today and Ole does have a great record against them but I've a feeling this game will end in a disappointing boring draw, so even 5/1 isn't as exciting as it sounds to me. I could be wrong, but United is pretty fairly unpredictable.

Instead, can we go for a shock Burnley win against Chelsea today as they pay for profligacy?

100 units at Fairlay on Burnley to WIN against Chelsea @14.92. Other odds: 13.80
Units advantage: 112

Chelsea only won by a goal, but the result didn't do them justice. Malmo were never going to score the way they played, couldn't even watch it much as the quality was too poor.

But we get another "bet against City" day today, and Brugge to me are better than Malmo... and City have lost 2 in a row! Maybe we get a rare 3rd loss blip?

100 units at Fairlay on Club Brugge to WIN vs Man City @26.4. Other odds: 24



Yeah, it has happened and I see it often enough but I don't think it's a guarantee. But yes, you could, presumably, take max odds on the underdog, and then as lines shift, place a bit on the favourite and on the draw -- in this way, I make occasional hedges when the odds shift big enough, but I tend to do this live.

E.g. You bet on Palace at 19/1, and by half time, they still lead, odds on City to win became 2/1 and a draw became 16/10. So you can hedge on double chance for guaranteed profit. But this is live betting since I'm a casual gambler, not arbitrage which I guess you're talking about.

I imagine there are arb opportunities for a full-time monitoring activity but I think bookies quickly detect this behaviour anyway! This is also not the purpose of this thread =)

15.00 - 6.00 - 1.22 on sportsbet
14,00 - 6,20 - 1,24 on stake

I will return to this a little later. I'll just lock in the odds before the match starts.


I understood you. By the way, it turns out that if you can place a bet there 2 weeks before the event, then during this time situations arise when the odds change in such a way that you can make a surebet (i mean a bet on two opposite outcomes with a guaranteed profit)? I can assume that for such a period of time, this is almost a guaranteed option.

After forgetting to put the palace bet last time out, I really can't ignore tonight's Malmo bet. Can we hope for Chelsea's backup strikers to panic in the UCL headlights?

100 units at Fairlay on Malmo to WIN vs Chelsea @17.03. Other odds: 15.5
Units advantage: 153




Not really, or at least, I should say, not scientifically. Say a match I'm interested in finally opens, a game 2 weeks from now. I see the opening lines and take note. Meanwhile, said team goes on to lose a game badly, or even 2 in a row. But they're playing well, just got unlucky.

Chances are, the lines will shift with every loss leading up, especially catastrophic ones. But if the team actually just got on the wrong end of results, they should still have the same odds as opening, but since bookies and betting then goes against them, I find it becomes a great bet.

If we place a bet at some point in time (for example, the day before the match), then we do not know what the closing line will look like in a day. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with comparing the odds (of our bet) with other odds in the market at the moment - this will give us an idea of how profitable bet we have made. Moreover, at a distance, this information will be correct - because the shift of the coefficients is equally probable both in one direction and in the other direction.
Obviously, the closing line takes into account more data and, hypothetically, it should be more accurate, but the day before we saw the closing line, we do not know what data will appear. We can say that our closing line is the market odds at that point in time at which we made a bet.


I don’t think this conclusion is valid for averages. It is correct about a particular case. buwaytress made a bet and it was clearly profitable according to the calculations. A couple of days later the situation changed (new data appeared) and it turned out that buwaytress's bet was unprofitable. Does this tell us that he was wrong? No. On average, the situation (new data) will equally likely affect the odds in both directions and in another situation, his bet when new data appears will become much more profitable than at the moment when it was made.

Thanks a lot for the links to the articles, I spent a lot of time thinking about them. Mainly trying to figure out how to prove the author is wrong In my opinion, the author is mistaken in the methodology in both articles, in the first one regarding the fact that profit, even at a huge distance, speaks of the skill of the bettor. This may be due to other reasons, the most obvious one that comes to my mind is that he was selling obvious unfair coefficients in the market and from a huge number of attempts to sell and a huge number of potential buyers, such sales were sometimes obtained.


Does this statistic sound like deep analytical work (15 bets per day, seven days a week)? In my opinion, this is similar to grinding.
How can you keep in your head such a huge amount of information (15 bets every day, which means he knew almost all sports at the pro level) in order to make bets more accurately than the bookmaker? This is unrealistic because the flow of information exceeds human capabilities.

In the second article, I was dumbfounded here:




It turned out that bookmakers/pinnacles closing line determined the outcome of sporting events with almost 100% accuracy, although he did not write about it directly, but clearly meant and offered "Let’s make a hypothesis: Pinnacle’s closing odds with the margin removed are equal to the true odds."
I think this is counterintuitive and fundamentally wrong. The problem is that it is impossible to prove it analytically (which is why he proposes to accept the hypothesis), since each event that we consider is unique and its true odds are unknown (and will never be known).
Therefore, with a simplified example, I will show how this hypothesis can be wrong.
Let's say we have 50 coins (the coins are symmetrical and we know about it). Obviously if we toss all the coins, the probability of getting Heads is 50% and on average we will get 25 Heads.
Now let's make an example closer to our realities. Let's say the bookmaker has 50 coins. He tosses them up and expects to see 25 Heads. And he gets them on average. But how accurate was his prediction?
For example, the coins were not symmetrical and had the following probabilities:
10 coins have a 30% chance of getting heads
10 coins have a 40% chance of getting heads
10 coins have a 50% chance of getting heads
10 coins have a 60% chance of getting heads
10 coins have a 70% chance of getting heads
The average total toss will be 25 Heads (3 from the first 10 coins, 4 from the second ten, 5 from the third ten, 6 from 4 and 7 from 5). He does not know about the asymmetry of the coins and thinks that his prediction was 100% correct (and the statistics of the tosses seem to confirm this). But we know about the asymmetry of the coins and understand that the bookmaker was right only 20% of the time.
I should note that in my example, the probabilities of getting Heads on coins were distributed linearly, in reality, the distribution law is obviously different (most likely something like a normal distribution), which makes it possible to obtain such beautiful graphs when predicting (as above), but they do not say anything the accuracy of forecasts and proximity to fair odds.

@buwaytress

Yes, I figured it out. Do I understand correctly that you are trying to place a bet in the first hours of the market appearance on some event, since you are catching odds that will definitely not be effective (close to real) but will be in your favor?

Thanks for all the feedback guys!

First off, I totally forgot to put up my traditional "If the odds are above 10/1 against City, you take it" bet and Crystal Palace were 19.50 today, actually even 23/1 but I failed to get my bets in early. I won't count it as the match is already underway.

@KTChampions: Fairlay is P2P so it's just regular players using the platform to put up their own markets, and of course, this means no bookie margins so you can squeeze out good value especially on unlikely outcomes. I remember it was 100/1 on each draw and win ML just a few weeks ago on Sheriff vs Real Madrid. Effectively 50/1 on Double Chance. While on Pinnacle it was a mere 40/1 ML win.

And as DS points out, lines shift ALL the time from the time the odds are available right up to kick off. And closing line is, I agree, what is the most accurate (or "fair value" as injuries, lineups and final formations are clear). A significant injury or surprise squad selection can really move lines a lot. I've seen 10/1 odds go to 5/1 just because some star player or two doesn't make it even to the bench.

This isn't really the right way to look at odds - comparing with the odds at some random moment in time only tells you what the market thinks then, which isn't the most accurate metric. It should be the closing line that you focus on, since the highest limits and the most data is available right before the game starts. This article from Pinnacle explains the concept of closing odds quite well, and this article talks a bit more about how pre-closing lines don't give as much information as the closing lines.

The odds for Chelsea vs Southampton had a closing line from Pinnacle of 1.42 - 4.93 - 7.87. Since buwaytress got lower odds than the closing line without margin removed (Pinnacle's margin is 3.3% here), it would be reasonable to say that his expected profit from the bet is negative on average.


If you look at the opening line for Chelsea vs Southampton, Pinnacle had 1.25 - 5.62 - 11.39 on October 12th. Odds generally shift less and less as we get closer to the match starting, but lines do move.

Thanks, I will try to take the time and explore both of these platforms. I have several theories in hand and a certain bankroll, so I want to test them in practice. A variety of platforms (and especially a wider range of bonuses and other features) will definitely be necessary for me.


Is this about the Fairlay platform? Traditional bookmakers more or less shift the odds only in live mode.


I'm 100% sure of that. And yes, in my opinion a blind strategy will work. In fact, the result of any sporting event cannot be determined precisely - it is random because it is unique (even with a coin where the odds are known for sure, we cannot predict the result of a single unique throw). Sometimes bookmakers are accurate in their assessment, sometimes they are not, but on average they are always in profit since their margin is in the odds. If there is a way to find a bet that will go with a coefficient greater than "fair odds + bookmaker's margin", then on average we will be in profit, regardless of how well we know about this sport (on which the bet is made) and on how much better/worse than the bookmaker we predicted the outcome. In fact, now you have found such a way and you are getting income, which, given the number of bets, cannot be estimated as a random uptrend.


This is a nickname from the good old days, and is dedicated to this team.

@KTChampions Thanks for your calculations -- and I promise to return to address some of the earlier comments, hopefully by 2 weeks if not this. Just caught up with work.

P.S. Fairlay actually has even better odds now than the bookies, whose odds have remained the same as you stated but increased by almost 8% on Fairlay -- as I said, usually the best odds for underdogs but you would actually get even better at Sportsbet with price boost.

It's difficult for me to make timings but I do try actually! For example, if I like a bet, the market can shift quite drastically and I do try to catch it at 15% more (an arbitrary percentage perhaps).

And yes, because of margins, it simply makes sense to take larger odds (when it suits you). It could even be a blind strategy and I'm almost certain bookies calculate this "theoretical profit" into their systems.

P.S. What's your nick mean?

Unfortunately, I could not make calculations using the old data, since I need the odds on the entire set of outcomes, and not only on the one on which the bet was made. Therefore, I will make calculations in those cases when I have such data, like now:


1.44 - 4.50 - 6.80 from sportsbet

1,45 - 4,60 - 6,60 from stake

First, I will calculate the bookmaker's margin:

1/1.44 + 1/4.5 + 1/6.8 =~ 1.064

1/1.45 + 1/4.6 + 1/6.6 =~ 1.059

If we assume that the margin is evenly added to each outcome (which is most likely incorrect, since usually there is a bias towards the favorite but it can be ignored now), then fair odds should be:

1.53 - 4.79 - 7.23

1.54 - 4.87 - 6.99

The consensus estimate of the chance of a third outcome would be 7.11, you were able to place a bet with odds of 7.37 and thus received a profit (theoretical) of 3.65%.