By James Evans
As an Arsenal fan, you’ll have likely placed a few friendly wagers between yourself and friends about the outcome of matches. Indeed as we all know football betting is big business worldwide and many players bet on matches for both fun and profit. Today, let’s take a quick look about how to read bookmaker odds on football matches.
There are three common types of betting odds you will see. The first is a money line bet. An example of a money line bet would be Arsenal -185, Draw +230, Liverpool +350. In this example, fans of Liverpool that bet £10 would win £35. Fans that bet on the Arsenal must wager £18.50 in order to win £10. In other words, the Arsenal are favored to win the game. You can also bet on a draw, which will pay £23 for £10 wagered in the bet above.
The next type of bet, and one that is very popular with online UK casinos is your typical fractional bet. With this bet, odds are fractional based, such as 4/1. The top number is how much you can win, while the bottom is how much you have to wager. An example would be if Chelsea was 50/1 to win the Premier League against the Arsenal’s 5/8 odds. Anyone betting on Chelsea would win £50 for every £1 wagered. Arsenal fans would have to wager £8 in order to win five. Basically, Chelsea is a longshot in this example.
Your final typical bet type is an over-under bet. These bets are usually placed on individual games and are decimal based. For example, you could bet one the number of goals that will be scored in a match between the Arsenal and Liverpool. Odds for more than 1.5 goals being scored would be 2.2 and under would be 1.33. In this case, the higher the number, the worse the odds. Taking the under would cost you £3 to win £1. A decimal line of 2.0 is break event, so the over is not much better than breaking even.
Finally, realize that oddsmakers take into account numerous factors regarding a game including team trends, injury reports, etc. They don’t have rooting interest in teams, so don’t take it personally if the odds don’t match your expectation of the games. Also, just like when you play casino games, only wager with money that you can afford to lose. Hopefully the information above will allow you to make better decisions on your football wagers and allow you to win more often.
Thanks for the summary James.
Tell me, just how difficult is it to detect criminal & illegal gambling rackets if the networks that are set-up are so complex and convulated; and true sport, by it’s very nature, is unpredictable at times?
Surely all sport has changed for the worse since betting and the “get rich quick” mentality has become so prevalent in all financially-conscious societies?
James, thanks for this summary.
As someone who has never been interested in placing a bet on a sporting event in my entire life, I must admit that I find all of this stuff very confusing 🙂 I’ve been trying to get caught up on it all recently, and I found this article helpful.
To anyone else who is in my same position, I would also recommend DogFace’s explanation of the Asian betting markets that can be found in this article:
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/17099
Thanks again, James.
@DC:
Unfortunately, this sort of corruption in sports is really nothing new. The dirty element has always been there, and it always will be, although the advent of the internet has certainly made it all more convoluted in modern times.
But for a historical example of gambling and match fixing, you can check out this Wikipedia entry on the “Black Sox Scandal,” which was a massive scandal that emerged in the 1920s in the US, when it was discovered that the 1919 World Series in American baseball had been fixed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal
It’s kind of interesting to see the way that, while some things have changed, others are exactly the same as they’ve always been.
Also, I couldn’t find the exact quote, but I’m thinking that there was some American gangster in the 1920s who was publicly quoted as saying:
“I always hated the World Series, until I fixed my first one.”
Or something along those lines. If I discover later that I incorrectly quoted this gangster, I will, of course, offer him a full and public apology 🙂
Sad to see Untold resorting to pushing betting in the game. This is where most of the ills of the sport originate. I know this is an easy sponsorship income stream, but I had higher expectations for this site & its ideals.
I have never bet on something so dear to me as Arsenal. How can you put a wager on your loved one?!
@Sammy the Snake:
I didn’t initially read this article as an attempt to “push” betting. However, if that was the intent, I agree with you.
As I live in a betting free part of the world (or better said: they come to my country to fix games where in Asia they bet on) I never bet on anything.
So I do confess I know almost nothing about such things but find it interesting to see the “rules” explained a bit.
If the fifty odd thousand Gooners inside the Emirates were to pop to the bookies before the game and bet an average £100 each on a loss before a game Arsenal needed to win, that ought to kick off a corruption investigation…
@Anne, thanks!
Having lived in the US on and off during my teens, I remember many people mentioning this whenever anything fishy was going on in sport! In some aspects, I hope that the betting game reveals our very own Black Sox scandal sooner rather than later! But I doubt very much that if it did, it would still clean things up completely as greed is too much in play nowadays!
Wrt the “factors” taken into account by the odds-makers, i wonder if that includes the referee in charge? If it doesn’t surely it should or would that be revealing too much?!
@DC:
In the article by DogFace that I linked to above, he said the following:
“Now if you think about…how we correlate…the choice of referee in our analysis – it poses a question i.e. are the market makers (very clever people in their own right with huge resources at their disposal) aware in any way of referee bias when they perform their calculations and make their markets?”
This issue stood out to me as well as something very interesting. However, if you are interested in gambling issues, I must say that you should be paying close attention to DogFace’s work on this site (if you aren’t already).
While I fully admit that I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time (well, maybe a quarter of the time would be more accurate… an eighth of the time? No, ok, I admit it. Half the time is the truth 🙂 ), if there’s one thing that I’m 100% certain of it’s that DogFace knows more about gambling markets than the rest of us put together.
Wait, am I straying off topic here…? Ok, yes, I am, and the reason is because I like to give DogFace credit for how smart he is because I’m kind of impressed by it, really 🙂
But anyway, as you can probably tell, I’m in no respectable condition to be leaving blog comments right now (it is Friday night, after all)So, cheers, cheers again, saludos, nostrovia, felicitats… Whatever, I’m out, ninos y queridos. 🙂
O…y al hombre que dice que tiene la cara de un perro, si, es la verdad que soy una gran afficionada…Y la razon es que eres muy inteligente. Tan inteligente que tengo un poco de celo, realmente… Pero queria decirte que lo he reconocido 🙂
Lol, muy bueno! I concur, dogface certainly can lead one to jealousy with his depth of knowledge!
Espero que los cócteles han estado fluyendo de esta noche?! Buenas noches!
@DC:
Lol. Si, tienes razon. Buenas noches 🙂
On the exchanges, the only thing that matters is what people are prepared to bet at and what someone else out there is prepared to lay.
Which means that the starting odds may be fixed by the bookies, but thereafter, the market rules.
You can shift the odds considerably just by trying to bet a lot on one outcome, after all……
The implication of this is that, if fans see it different to the bookies, the actual odds quoted may be inefficient.
Most fans won’t be holding 50 different accounts and using search engines to find the best odds, so the markets aren’t really efficient in reality……..
The only advice I have for Arsenal fans after Newcastle 4 Arsenal 4 is this: close out any bets on Arsenal before 90 minutes are up if you have the chance to do so……..