Sports betting has always been a popular activity for many people, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a great way to get involved with the sport you love and potentially make some money while doing it. However, for most people, sports betting is more of a fun pastime than a serious way of making money. That’s where sports betting arbitrage comes in. In this post, we will explain what sports betting arbitrage is and how you can use it to make money.
Sports betting arbitrage is a betting strategy that involves taking advantage of discrepancies in the odds offered by different bookmakers. By placing bets on all possible outcomes of an event, the bettor can guarantee a profit, regardless of the outcome. This strategy is also known as sure betting, miracle betting, or just arb betting.
While sports betting arbitrage can be a profitable strategy, it can also be time-consuming and complicated. That’s where +EV betting comes in. +EV betting is a better version of arbitrage that is simpler to calculate mathematically, less time-consuming, and can help you make more money faster.
So what is +EV betting? EV stands for expected value and is a term commonly used by the finance industry, investment analysts, quantitative traders, and all the wolves of Wall Street. It comes from probability theory and represents how much you can expect to make, disregarding any risk.
In sports betting, EV is easy to calculate. It is the sum of all the products of the payoff x probability of that event. For example, let’s say there is a soccer game between Norwich and Manchester United, and the bookie is offering 1.42 for Manchester United to win. This means the payoff is 42 cents if Manchester United wins and a loss of $1 if Manchester United loses or it’s a draw. The EV is, therefore, the probability of Manchester United winning x 0.42 + probability of a draw or loss x – 1.
If you do the EV calculation for this, you will most certainly find that it is negative. This represents how much the sportsbooks are ripping you off.
Being an +EV bettor means that you take only the bets that are the positive expected value and ignore the negative ones.
To understand why +EV betting is superior to arbitrage betting, let’s take the classic example of the coin toss.
First, the arbitrage bettor will make a bet on both heads and tails, to guarantee profit.
Now, the +EV bettor has calculated the odds of 4 as a positive expected value and the odds of 1.8 as a negative expected value. He has the same $3 to bet, but this time he will place all his money on heads at 4 odds since heads has +EV.
As you can see, the Expected Value for the +EV bettor is $3 for each bet he places. Now let’s see what’s the EV for the Arbitrage Bettor:
EV for the Arbitrage Bettor is $0.80 for each bet he places. It’s far less than the $3 EV for the +EV Bettor. This shows why the +EV betting strategy is superior to the Arbitrage betting strategy.
Here are the main advantages and disadvantages of both strategies:
+EV betting is better in the long run because you only need to place the positive EV bet. On the other hand, in Arbitrage betting, you place two bets(the positive EV and the negative EV bets) and are expected to make less.
The main advantage of Arbitrage betting is that it is risk-free, which makes it appealing to many people. No matter the outcome, you will make a profit, but it will be much lower than the +EV strategy. This risk-reduction method is not worth it if you want to play in the long run.
To better understand why +EV betting is better, you need to understand the Law of Large Numbers, which states:
Considering this, now let’s go back to our coin toss example. By doing some quick maths, we determined that out of 1000 coin flips, there will be 450 heads 99.9% of the time. Let’s see what this will look like for our Arbitrage bettor:
Our Arbitrage bettor is expected to make a profit of $780 out of 1000 coin flips. Now let’s see how this will look like for our +EV bettor:
Our +EV bettor is expected to make a profit of $2400 out of 1000 coin flips, which is far more profit than the Arbitrage bettor. And this is the worst-case scenario, with 450 heads. If the heads flips go up, the difference will be much greater.
In conclusion, even with terrible luck but with the help of the Law of Large Numbers, +EV betting is the best choice in the long run to make a higher profit.
Discover EV+ betting and how to apply it in the real world, by clicking the link below: