The Sports Betting Tip That No One Tells You

When looking into sports betting as a whole. The average person will notice a clear gap between those that we can call normal bettors and professional bettors. Professional bettors while not always having the best win rates, are consistently making money from their bets.

It seems counterintuitive that money can still be made when losing more than half of your wagered bets. In the below, we will discuss what is often seen as the best strategy when making bets. Value betting.

Value Betting

It’s worth noting that value betting is not an incredible smoking gun which will allow anybody to suddenly make profit. To be successful in any betting, one still needs to have a great base of research and sufficient skill to know when to take a bet.

Fade The Public

The ability to fade the public will be one of the most important skills a bettor can pick up when using value betting. Let’s go deeper into what exactly it means to fade the public. To understand fading the public, we must first understand how a sportsbook works and how they set up odds. A typical sportsbook does not make money by betting against players, they avoid betting at all costs.

A sportsbook will try to level the potential payout on the positive and negative side of a bet, to achieve this, a sportsbook would need to get a ratio similar to the odds of bettors on either side of a bet. Odds are usually tailored to the expected outcomes and with larger matches the odds are usually good at predicting not only the probability of winning but the split in the betting market too. While this is a perfect scenario, it isn’t always that simple.

When one side brings a much stronger betting majority to the table, sportsbooks will end up in a situation where the betting market does not represent the odds ratios at all.

To combat this, the sportsbooks will skew the odds in the underdogs favour, allowing not only more bettors to take the underdog bet, but an even ratio of bettors on either side. In this situation, we see the implied odds drift away from the real odds, taking the bet on the underdog team in this situation is known as fading the public.  Let’s look at a hypothetical example of fading the public.

Chelsea F.C. – 1.1

Celtic F.C. – 10

From the odds displayed above, we can calculate that the implied odds of Chelsea winning the match are roughly 90%. From our own research and calculations, we would only give Chelsea a 75% odds of winning the game. This discrepancy is in place as Chelsea would have the vast betting majority, most likely from having a much larger avid fan base.

This discrepancy in implied odds vs actual odds makes the underdogs, Celtic F.C in this case, a fantastic value proposition. If we were to only win one out of the 5 bets we take with great value, we would still be profitable in the long term.