Value Betting - Finding Bets Where Prices Are Bigger Than Their True Price

The concept of value betting is important to a professional bettor because if he cannot seek out and find a price greater than the true price, then he will not be able to win in the long run!

If you are in a casino and playing roulette then the odds for all your bets are laid out in stone. If you back black then the odds for your bet are even money. This means from a betting point of view every time you bet you should win once every two goes or 50% of the time. However, because the house has 0 and sometimes 00 the house has an edge over the punter as there are 18 black numbers and 18 white numbers along with two greens 0 and 00.

So the punters chances of winning are actually less than 50%. Over a sustained period of time the punter cannot win as the odds are in the favour of the house. In sports events the odds for a race or game are compiled by a bookmakers odds compiler and these odds change up to and during the race or game. As a punter you should be looking for anomilies in the odds to have a bet.

We are searching for prices greater than the true price. If you can find a bet that should be even money 1/1 but the bookmaker is offering 2/1 then we should be backing this opportunity. Why, because if the true odds are even money then the horse/team/player will win once every two times and with the us getting odds of 2/1 we are ahead of the game.

If this scenario happened 6 times we would win three times and lose three times but because we took odds of 2/1 and we had bet 1 point on each event we would have won six points (3 X 2/1) and lost three points giving us a profit of three points.

Example:

An example of how this works in practice would be as follows: The 2009 gold cup has just been won by Kauto Star at odds of around 7/4. A few weeks before the Gold Cup Kauto Star's main rival and stable mate Denman was due to run at Kempton and the ante post Gold Cup market had Denman as 2/1 fav and Kato Star as 3/1 2nd fav. The vibes were not great and i knew that if Denman got beaten 3/1 for Kato Star was a big price as his odds must surely shorten. I backed Kauto Star at 3/1 for the Gold Cup. Denman was beaten and Kauto Star was the new Gold Cup ante post fav at odds of around 6/4! Value was 3/1, at 6/4 Kato was not a bet worth taking as a number of issues such as stamina and jumping made a bet prohibitive at the price even though he did eventually win!

If a bet is greater than its true price it may not win. Similarly, a bet that is not value may win. The point is that if over time you bet because the price is greater than it should be you will win over time. If you constantly bet when the price less than it should be then you will ultimately lose because you are losing more times than the true price of the event you have bet on.

Value can be found at any price and that includes odds on. If the true price of an event is 1/2 and you can get 4/5 or 4/6 then you have found value. The famous pro punter and owner of Denman Harry Findlay made a lot of his money backing Tennis matches for large stakes at odds against prices!

I will discuss more about upcoming value situations on my blog.

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