Editor’s Note: This article on betting odds is posted in collaboration with an outside sponsorship client. The opinions and information contained within do not necessarily represent Frontstretch and its staff.
The drive for bettors is to put some profit from their wagers into their pockets. But how do the odds that are being played impact your betting success? This is an interesting angle of sports betting that perhaps gets a little bit glossed over.
It’s not uncommon to see some punters, especially those a bit newer to sports betting, just snap up the odds that are in front of them – especially in motorsports. It is more about just picking the selection that the punter wants than trying to get the best possible odds for that particular bet, or understanding whether it’s a good wager or not.
Understanding exactly what betting odds are and how the bookmakers set them can help you to make better decisions when it comes time to pick out your selections.
What Are Betting Odds?
Betting odds are numbers that represent the probability of an event happening and the amount of money you can win if you successfully place a bet on that event. For example, in soccer, if you bet 10 dollars on Arsenal who are 2.0 odds and they win, you will get 20 dollars back (10 x 2). If you bet 10 dollars on Tottenham at 3.0 and they win, you will get 30 dollars back (10 x 3).
In racing, the odds to win is often the most popular bet. If you bet 10 dollars on 3.5 odds that Max Verstappen will win a Formula One grand prix, for example, you would end up with 35 dollars back (10 x 3.5).
Look through any list of online bookmakers, for instance, like the one presented at https://legalbet.uk/rating-user/, and you will see a large range of markets and betting odds. Those numbers are not just randomly plucked out of the air, they are based on the results of bookmaker analysis of mostly statistical factors.
Within those odds, bookmakers have added their margin, which is a way of them making some profit, regardless of what happens in terms of the outcome. A bookmaker won’t offer you true odds on a balanced market as there is an :overround” worked in.
The simple explanation is that if the true odds for a coin toss are 2.0 for heads and 2.0 for tails, a bookmaker might instead offer 1.9 for heads and 1.9 for tails. This means that they pay out less than what the true odds would be, and in this case, the bookmaker has a five percent profit margin on…
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