Know Your Enemy : The Bookmaker

Know your Enemy The Bookmaker

I’ll spare you the numbers of the business of the Betting industry, which you can find quietly on Google, but they are incredible data and disarming. I remind you, however, that only 3% of bettors onlong run is profitable with bookmakers.

Your activity as a bettor (professional e not) collides daily with the activity of bookmakers, which are nothing more than companies that they earn from your misjudgments.
In the end it’s a war on who makes the least mistakes, but the bookmaker has an advantage that many overlook

MATHEMATICS

It will be difficult and rare (but not impossible) for it to be you to earn due to a bookmaker’s misjudgment,
but later we will see this too. The battlefields between bettors and bookmakers are the PRICES of the various markets, which more familiarly we call ODDS or ODDS.
The bookmaker sets the price that is available at pay if you guessed that particular market.
The higher this price is, the more the bookamker is available at pay you, the lower it is the less willing to pay you.
This willingness to pay is not accidental and is linked the probability of occurrence of the event itself.

Let’s take a practical example.

Suppose we find Inter’s home win at 1.50

WHY THIS PRICE?

As mentioned, the price represents the probability of occur decreed by the bookmaker.
This probability expressed as a percentage is given by following formula:

PROBABILITY = 100 / ODDS

In the specific case of the victory of Inter it would be:
100 / 1.50 = 66.66%

For the bookmaker Braga has a 66.66% chance of win, that is for them if this match comes
hypothetically played 100 times (obviously with the same characteristics) the Inter team would win about 67 times.

The bookmaker leaves nothing to chance, and also has gods profit margins hidden from your eyes.

Let’s take another practical example.
Suppose we are in front of a tennis event (in which therefore the draw is not foreseen) with the
“TENN PLAYER A” quoted at 1.90 and “TENN PLAYER B” quoted also at 1.90.

But then I ask you, if the probability is 50% why the bookmaker doesn’t price them at 2.00?
Their game is much more subtle than you think. This 10% difference (called AGIO) between the fee
2.00 (mirror of a 50% chance) and the odds available of 1.90 is their SAFE EARNINGS.

But you have already understood that behind the odds there is a incredible and unknown world.

We have seen that behind this price there is one odds decreed by the bookmaker, and how they look
to level the shares in such a way as to reserve a secure profit margin.

WHICH FACTORS MAKES THE ODD CHANGE?

Let’s start immediately by saying that the opening odds (EARLY) are primarily influenced by Asian bookmakers, who
they are the point of reference for all bookmakers world championships.
This adjustment does not only take place during the opening phase, but it is still constant until the markets close and i bookmakers have automated or semi-automated systems to keep in touch with each other.

But the real engine of the odds swing is the so-called “wisdom of the crowd”.
Despite the results of sporting events you can not know in adavance, the crowd (the whole of bettors) is generally able to provide an accurate assessment of the probabilities of occurrence. Bookmakers follow the flow of money, with which the
bettors express their “opinions”, for adjust their odds as best they can. In practice, their perception of probability changes in the time.

The higher the liquidity (and therefore popularity) of a given market, the better the collective judgement.
The greater the number of players acting in a manner independent, the more likely people are
have analyzed the event carefully and that the odds are accurate.
It is for this reason that a drop, i.e. a share in downhill, on an event with low liquidity (for example a friendly) is never a sign of trustworthiness “opinion”.