The evolution of exchange betting has revolutionised market-making to such a degree that even the biggest bookmaker names no longer employ professional odds setters.

1. Understanding Football Odds - Doc's Sports
2. Nfl Football Odds To Win
3. Moneyline Bets Explained ~ How To Read Moneyline Betting Odds
4. Understanding Odds In Football Betting

How did odds making start?

Well it’s simple: if a bookmaker has an overround of 105% on each of five football matches, a punter placing a bet in all five of those matches is betting against an overround 125% because the extra 5% is factored in each time. The growth of betting and odds compiling. Understanding football odds always is a process. We can start with an introduction to what is football. Football is one of the most beloved sports in the world. With its origins varying from. Betting odds can be extremely confusing and the information they convey can be overwhelming. When it comes to understanding betting odds, it’s important to start with the basics. Once you have all that covered, it becomes easy to interpret what all those darn numbers mean. How Betting Odds. Understanding Football Odds The biggest thing in regards to understanding NFL odds relates to the point spread that's put up on each game. Betting on football isn't as simple as just picking the eventual winner of the game, you've got to consider who will win, but more importantly by how much. Understanding Betting Odds In sports “betting odds” are not the chances of an event of occurring, but the means to calculate the payout from a bet. In a way, they are similar to chance odds, but not exactly the same. For those wanting to understand betting odds, we explain not only what they are but how to read them.

As touched on in our Brief History of Betting blog, the concept of calculating the likely chance of a winner in a horse race, and converting that into bookmaker odds, was devised by one Harry Ogden.

Operating on Newmarket Heath towards the end of the 18th century, Ogden was the first bookmaker to take betting beyond its strikingly crude roots. Most early bets were simply a way of settling an argument over whether a named event would come to pass or not.

Not only did Ogden begin the process of making a book, he also understood that he had to save a percentage of his takings for his own purse. In order to achieve this, he slightly adjusted prices in his favour. It worked: if somebody won a bet and got paid out at odds of 4/1 they were unlikely to complain, especially at this early stage, that they had not been paid at the true probability of 5/1.

Understanding Football Odds - Doc's Sports

So already, within Ogden’s lifetime we witnessed the evolution of a book featuring a range of prices as well as the concept of what is now known as an “overround”.

What is an overround book?

A perfect book, without factoring in a margin for the bookie, would mean the implied probability of all outcomes would add up to 100%. However, bookies use the concept of overround to stretch this probability greater than 100% – which then becomes their profit.

Here’s an overround example from a tennis match:

Now, have you ever considered why bookmakers like to encourage accumulators in sports like football where punters enjoy backing multiple selections in a single bet?

Nfl Football Odds To Win

Well it’s simple: if a bookmaker has an overround of 105% on each of five football matches, a punter placing a bet in all five of those matches is betting against an overround 125% because the extra 5% is factored in each time.

The growth of betting and odds compiling

By the 1950s the big firms that covered the length and breadth of the country betting on horses and greyhounds were already employing odds-makers to help them compile what was known as the “tissue” for each race.

This was effectively the first show of prices. Bookmakers would certainly collude to some degree to check their assessments of the market were not wildly out of place but by and large they were happy to trust their instincts.

The prices were not static: they moved to respond to market forces after the first show was published on the boards.

What did a bookie do if he felt liabilities were in danger of getting too big on a particular horse? All he had to do was rub off the displayed price on his chalkboard and put up a less attractive price. He might then balance his book by pushing out the prices of less fancied runners.

The advent of legal betting shops

The golden age of betting was triggered by the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act – a watershed development that allowed betting on racing and greyhounds to take place in licensed shops around the country.

For the first time, punters did not need to be physically at a racecourse or dog track to legally place a bet. There was still an incentive for big-time punters to go racing because if they were betting in shops they had to pay tax.

But bookmakers small and large had to be on the lookout to protect themselves against betting coups in what was now “open season” for big-stakes punters. If, for example, a group of individuals could target multiple betting shops at the same time soon before the start of a race it was hard in the pre-internet age to ensure the price was cut in time.

The Yellow Sam plot of 1975 was a perfect illustration of how a meticulously organised plot could evade the best attempts of the bookies to minimise their exposure.

The 1990s: Multiple sports, multiple platforms

When restrictions were lifted on football betting to unlock a wide range of markets on individual matches, horse racing’s dominance as a sports betting medium was challenged for the first time.

At the same time, firms were opening more and more shops, allowing telephone and online accounts while accessing more and more global television feeds.

This was the decade in which odds-compilers really earned their corn for bookies like Coral, Ladbrokes and William Hill – traditional names with presence on the high-street, at the courses and, bit by bit, on rudimentary web browsers too.

Sports traders and palps

If, for example, you were a graduate with a good degree in maths or economics and you also followed rugby union religiously you could be hired specifically to draw up rugby union markets for one of the big operators.

With so much sport to bet on, and so many new avenues from which to glean useful information, this was also the time that “palps” (bookie slang for palpable errors) were at their most prevalent.

Shrewd punters could sometimes find out if an obscure tennis match or an overseas domestic football game had been rescheduled to an earlier time slot. If the bookies were unaware they could find themselves accepting a bet on an event that had already happened.

How exchanges changed the landscape

The arrival of Betfair into an increasingly cluttered market in 2000 proved a positive intervention in a number of ways, even if some small on-course bookmakers to this day rue the dawn of exchange betting.

Betfair had a huge USP: it was allowing markets to be set by individuals trading on its platforms hours and sometimes days in advance. The prices were not set by individual odds-makers using personal assessment.

Over the intervening 20 years, the exchanges have had their ups and downs but for bookmakers they provide two major positives which serve as some sort of compensation for draining them of the business they once did.

Firstly, by using the wisdom of the crowd, exchanges establish robust markets relatively quickly meaning betting companies no longer need to invest so heavily in their own odds-makers.

Secondly, the exchanges provide an easy mechanism for bookmakers to lay off worrying liabilities and can even provide early warning of a potential betting coup attempt.

What is BetConnect’s role in the market?

BetConnect is a hybrid solution that combines many of the strengths of the Betfair model – it is, after all, a peer-to-peer exchange – alongside the reassurance of big bets being matched without restrictions.

Available prices quoted are based on real-time markets provided by a wide range of online bookmakers. The platform gives bettors reassurance that they are getting the best bookie prices while layers know where to head for matched betting opportunities.

BetConnect’s single biggest advantage is its ability to fuse three disparate groups of individuals:

1. Professional punters who have grown frustrated by restrictions imposed on them by the bookies
2. Recreational players who enjoy backing and laying selections
3. The growing community of matched betting enthusiasts

If you think you’re ready to bet on horse racing or any other sport then sign up for a BetConnect account now. BetConnect is the only exchange that lets you back selections at bookie odds with no restrictions, and lay the selections of other account-holders commission-free. Not sure how it works? Read this simple guide.

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Odds on betting – Explained

Learning how to understand betting odds and read them correctly is the first thing you must do if you wish to bet online or offline.

The principle of betting odds is to tell you, the ‘punter’, how likely it is that an event or outcome will happen. This includes telling you how much you can win for a desired stake amount.

No bookmaker can predict the future, that is why all events’ odds are based on probability. Odds are important because you can’t bet without them.

The Basics

Placing a bet is the method of predicting what the outcome of a sporting event will be.
Bookmakers display odds on what the probability is of the event outcome, e.g. win, lose, draw.
2 simple forms of understanding probability are the roll of a dice and a coin toss. Choosing a number on a dice is a one in six chance that it will happen and choosing the side of a coin is a one in two chance.
In betting, this outcome ‘chance’ is displayed as odds.
Odds are most commonly displayed in one of two ways; fractional or decimal.

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Fractional Odds

Fractional odds are displayed as numbers separated by a forward slash, e.g. 5/1.
When a bookmaker tells you the odds based on the above they will say ‘five to one’.
These odds are just mathematics showing the probability of the event outcome and how much you will get back if you predict the outcome correctly.

The number on the left of the forward slash is the amount you receive if your bet wins.
The number on the right is the amount you bet to receive the amount on the left.
For example; 5/1 will give you 5 units back for every 1 unit you bet, in addition to getting your stake back.
So if you bet £1 at 5/1, you will receive £5 + £1 stake back if successful, giving a total of £6.

Other examples are:
8/1 – You will receive 8 units back for every 1 unit you bet + your stake.
7/2 – You will receive 7 units back for every 2 units you bet + your stake.
6/4 – You will receive 6 units back for every 4 units you bet + your stake.
If the number on the left is higher than the number on the right, it means that it is less likely to occur.
However, in fractional odds, the number on the left is not always greater than the number on the right.
If the left number is less than the right, it is known as ‘odds on’, meaning the event prediction has a good chance to happen.
For example; 1/2 means that for every 2 units you bet, you will get 1 unit back.
In addition, often bookmakers display odds as ‘Evens’, which is the same as 1/1 and will give you one unit back for one unit you bet.
Shorter odds (e.g. 1/2) mean less return than 2/1, but also mean that the event outcome is more likely to happen.

Decimal Odds

Decimal odds are exactly what it sounds like – odds of the event, displayed as a decimal number, e.g. 4.00.
To calculate how much you can win using decimal odds, multiply the odds by your bet amount.
For example; odds of 4.00 x £1 (or currency equivalent) equals £4 return. £3 win plus £1 stake.
Decimal odds automatically factor in your stake amount to the price, which is the main difference from fractional odds.
Decimal odds of 4.00 is the same as 3/1.

Examples of decimal odds:
5.50 – You will receive 5.50 multiplied by your stake, e.g. 5.50 x £1 = £5.50 return.
1.70 – You will receive 1.70 multiplied by your stake, e.g. 1.70 x £1 = £1.70 return.
All examples are done in the simplest of forms using 1 currency unit stake. However, you can easily use the same calculation for any stake amount, such as:
If your stake is £5.50, and you multiply this by odds of 4.70, your return will be £25.85.

Betting Favourites

Almost every betting market has a favourite when it comes to outcome.
This means that it is most likely to win over the other participants, be it horse racing, greyhounds or tennis etc.
Favourites are usually the shortest odds out of all potential winners. In horse racing, the favourite is represented by F. Sometimes the 2nd favourite or even joint favourite is also displayed, which are represented by 2F and JF.

Moneyline Bets Explained ~ How To Read Moneyline Betting Odds

Fractional Vs Decimal

When it comes to choosing how you want to display odds, there is no right or wrong answer.
It is purely down to the preference of the person placing the bet.
Many online bookmakers provide automatic odds selection so that you can select how you want the odds displayed.
Fractional odds are more old-school and used to dominate every type of betting market. However, in 2018 we are seeing the continuous rise of decimal odds for sports betting as they are generally easier to work out and calculate. In addition, people prefer decimals on sports betting exchanges as they can clearly see when odds change by only a slight margin.

Understanding Odds In Football Betting

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