Sports Arbitrage Betting; Highway To Riches Or A Pipe Dream?
- Filed under: Casinos
- Date: Nov 15,2009
Sports Arbitrage Betting, ‘Arb Trading’, ‘Sure Bets’ and ‘scalping’ all basically mean the same thing: the idea of realizing a profit from the fact that different bookmakers have different views about the statistical probability of a particular event happening.
Under normal circumstances, if you place a bet on both possible outcomes of a sporting event at one particular bookmaker, the odds are calculated in such a way that, although you are guaranteed to win, the cost of the bet will be more than the payout.
If you can find two bookmakers, however, who offer different odds for the same event, you might well be in the pound seats. You could then e. G. Place a bet that team A will win a certain match at one of the brokers, and place another bet that team B will win the match at the other broker. If you do your calculations properly, you can end up with a guaranteed profit of around 4% to 5%. Since bookmaking has become computerized, it has become much more difficult to find such opportunities though.
What follows is a very basic example.
Suppose you have two soccer teams playing the coming weekend. Bookmaker 1 has the following odds: 1.10 on the home team and 8.00 on the visiting team. Bookmaker 2 has different odds: 1.20 on the home team and 5.00 on the visiting team.
Now let us work out how much you’ll have to bet on every potential result to make a profit of $4000.
Bookmaker A:$3636.40 at 1.10 wins $4000,$500 at 8 wins $4000
Bookmaker Y:$6666. 80 on 1. 2 wins $8000,$1600 on 5 wins $8000
Looking at the above figures you can no doubt see that placing a bet on both potential outcomes at Bookmaker 1 will cost you $2068.20 and you will only win $2000, thus costing you $68.20. Betting on both teams at bookmaker 2 will cost you $2066.70 and you will still only win $2000, resulting in a net cost of $33.50 for you. So obviously both bookmaker 1 and bookmaker 2 have calculated their odds properly – they are going to make a net profit regardless of who wins.
The good news is, however, that you can still make a profit. If you placed a bet on the underdog at bookmaker A, it will cost you only $500 to make $4000. If you then go on and place a bid on the favourite team at Bookmaker B, that bid will cost you $3333.40. Total cost of both bids = $3833. 40. Guaranteed win = $4000. Guaranteed profit = $4000 – $3833.40 = $166.60.
Sports arbitrage betting might therefore sound complicated, but is in fact quite simple. The challenge is to study odds offered by potentially hundreds of bookmakers to find an arbitrage opportunity and then to act quickly to make use of that opportunity.
Apart from that you must also watch out that your betting costs don;t eat up all your profits. Too many withdrawals might well do just that. Very often there is a fixed cost involved with every withdrawal and deposit you make at a bookmaker. If you don’t watch out, this can soon eat up all your profits from sports arbitrage betting.
Searching for a different way to make bets? If you’ve never heard of arbitrage betting, you’re missing out! Learn everything there is to know about sports arbitrage betting here and find out what you’ve been missing!
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