Casino Odds

The popular games of the world of casinos such as Roulette have odds that are ‘known’ and dictated by the laws of physics; the casino has a little ‘edge’ or a ‘cut’ over the real probabilities and the gamblers try to be the profitable ones at the expense of the losses of other players – in other words the casino ‘intermediates’ the position of the winning and losing bettors.

Unlike sports events that have odds based on estimations instead of true probabilities, you can easily calculate the ‘edge’ of a casino which normally is much lower than most gamblers believe: something in the house of 2-4% are common numbers.

Sports Betting Odds

Fixed Odds Betting

Unlike some kinds of horse racing bets that happen in the ‘Jockey Clubs’ of Brazil, the most popular form of sports betting in the country is the retail market of fixed odds bets.

They are called that way because you know how much you may win before the events happens.

When a bettor is deciding whether to place a bet or not, the main question usually is ‘are these odds good enough considering the chances of this event happening?’ or ‘are the odds big enough?’. Although some punters are profitable based on ‘gut feeling’, there are ways to ‘teach’ your mind to see the sports events as numbers which can help you to improve your long-term sports betting results.

While casinos are entirely based on luck or ‘meta-physical’ factors if you believe in these things, sports betting allows the gamblers the chance of profiting in a sustained way based on skills to estimate upcoming sports events – as the gambling houses simply act as intermediaries between punters of opposing views about the same upcoming sports events, you can now understand why it doesn’t make sense the notion of ‘beating the odds’ or ‘beating the house’ – you are in fact beating or losing money to the ‘other side’, i.e. punters. The house cut is very small comparing to the money that ‘pays’ winning bettors.

Percentages of profit margins can vary a lot, but you should have in mind that the ‘cuts’ taken by sports books are of circa 7%, i.e. if you lose a bet on a game between Grêmio and Inter you are losing to the punters that think the other result was more likely.

This ‘notion’ is important to understand that the sportsbooks aren’t ‘against you’ or even ‘on your side’, the skills to ‘beat the market’ require that you are ‘right more often than you are wrong’.

Let’s try to learn a simple but effective technique used by many sports betting professionals.

Transforming Ideas into Numbers

If you can estimate the chances of team winning or a draw happening in terms of number of games, the ‘transformation’ of those figures into odds is easy. We suggest making the following process of ‘conversion’ whenever you try to estimate the chances of a sport event happening:

If the match in question would happen 100 times under the same conditions, what results would be expected:

Let’s say you are estimating the chances of Grêmio winning a Grenal valid for the Gauchão to be played at their domains. Try to understand the following estimation and formula for a hypothetical scenario:

  • Grêmio wins the game: 55 out of 100 times = 100% / 55% ~= 1.81 (decimal odds)
  • Math Draw: 25 out of 100 times = 100% / 25% = 4.0 (decimal odds)
  • Inter wins: 20 out of 100 times = 100% / 20% = 5.0 (decimal odds)

The ‘method’ of the winning punters says you should try to always bet on odds that are quite bigger than your own estimated ‘fair odds’ as they are called in the jargon of the professionals.

Any skill that is ‘trained’ becomes keener, therefore your skills to estimate the outcomes of football games or other events like MMA fights need to be trained in practice. It may be a bit hard to simulate just 100 games as the difference between 20 or 25 games in your hypothetical scenario can impact the odds a lot, but to ‘demonstrate’ it’s proportion to % values we did it that way – you may prefer to simulate 1000 games in your minds instead.

What matters at the end of the day are the results: measure your skills based on your financial results after a betting day / week / month / year.