Life Cycle Of A Bet : Stage 3 – Strategy

After doing your Research and Analysis it is time for Strategy. You’ve got a pretty good idea about how you think things will play out so it’s time to apply that Edge and decide how best to take advantage of the errors or inefficiencies in the betting markets.

One common approach is to actually price up your own markets. It can help to do this without looking at the current markets so that you aren’t biased, but once you’ve priced up your own markets you can compare them to the actual markets to see where the big discrepancies are. These are the discrepancies that you want to bet. For instance, if you rate a team’s chance of winning at 50%, that’s a price of 2.00 and if the actual market is offering 2.50 then there is your value proposition

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This is one of the main reasons why I started including the betting markets and prices into my Research and Analysis phases. What I look for is Value. There is no such thing as a sure thing and once you get the right Betting Mindset you’ll see the wealth of opportunities in front of you. You should always be comparing the Implied Probability (of the market odds) against the Actual Probability (that you’ve calculated). That is where profitable betting lies. I personally use a variation of the Kelly Criterion to figure out my betting stakes based on the size of the discrepancy :-

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It can be tricky converting your Analysis into an effective Strategy if you’re unfamiliar with developing betting Edges. It takes some practise but I’ll give you an example from the NRL that I no longer use because the market has been banned so I’m not really giving anything away. It was the First Scoring Play market. You could back either team for a Try or a Penalty Goal to be the first points of the game. The First Scoring Play market was banned due to the potential for insider spot-fixing, but I suspect the Bookies were getting smashed on it anyway because statistical models won’t work here, or in many of the banned markets.

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Often my Analysis would turn up that a team, or even a Captain was struggling with confidence and scoring points. Maybe they’d come off a heart-breaking, low scoring loss or two. Chances are that if they are presented with a penalty early in the game they would play safe and go for the 2 points, yet you could often get that team scoring a Penalty Goal from 8.00 to 13.00. Exceptional value. Other times you’d get 2 teams full of confidence with their attacks in form. They are never going to take a shot at goal and if they get a penalty they will back themselves to score a Try. The early run of play could be frantic and a bit of a coin-toss. Yet here the underdog team might be priced at 3.00+ which was also often great value.

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What I am trying to do in this stage is to make a list of bets that I WANT to make, the prices I am looking to make them and most importantly, the timing that I want to make those bets. Sometimes you only want to bet just before the event starts. Sometimes you actually want to bet In-Play once the contest has already started. It could be a set time (like 10 mins into the game), or when a specific event occurs (like a player substitution). I still haven’t actually placed any bets yet but I am putting a plan together that I will try to Execute in the next stage.

At the end of this stage you have a Betting Plan

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