Mathematical foundations of betting

Step by step towards successful betting - Mathematical foundations of betting

If you ever thought that you really don’t care about math in betting, you probably shouldn’t expect to make money from betting. It is true that many betters did achieve short-term success by betting based on instinct. They felt or believed that the preferred matches will have the right result at the end. However, this approach is not sufficient for success in the long term. You need a sustainable betting plan and to understand which odds reflect the right probability, find a so-called fair odds and your long-term aim should be to bet above the fair odds.

Betting on higher odds than those reflecting fair probability

Basically, what you’re searching for are odds which are higher than those which reflect fair probability. It's a simple numbers game. Let’s consider the classical example of a coin flip, where the probability of each outcome (heads or tails) is 50%. This means that the fair odds are 2.00 – 2.00 (in decimal numbers). If we find an offer with odds that are higher than 2.00 then that would represent a valuable bet, one that we could safely bet on (depending on by how much it exceeds 2.00 and our money management) and which would bring us long-term profit.

Naturally, in practice there are many factors which can affect or change the odds, i.e., alter the probabilities for the given bet. These include changes in team compositions, injuries, current shape, inaccurate odds listed at the beginning due to non-complex reflection of actual events and others. And all of these things could potentially be hiding value. That’s something one needs to quickly identify and react to.

More information about how value is created, how to quantify it, and how it reflects the sum that one can safely bet will be provided in the next articles.