How to Use Odds Percentages to Identify the Best Bet Soccer Value

How to identify value in your bets? That’s the big question. My friend, Alex Napier, who operates the Best Bet Soccer website, has asked me to write this article to explain the concept of odds percentages and identify the best value. He has asked me to look at soccer betting, where, due to the number of games, we can have some very high-value bets with huge odds against the Home team due to their being a home advantage.

As an example, we have the following match tonight:

Blackpool: (A) v. (H)

This looks like a classic case where one of the teams is probably very likely to win. The bookies are offering odds of over 6 on ‘Blackpool’ to win the match and ‘Hatem Ben Arduin’ to win the match due to the bookie believing the Home team is more likely to win.

The problem is that, even though we know this, we still think the Home team is more likely to win due to the odd selection.

What I resolution to reach here is to calculate the odds and then check the various bookie prices with a certain percentage of the total stake – e.g. 20%, 30% or 40%..

Bookmakers with very high prices could well be offering less value than those with a more reasonable price. Similarly, those with a very low price are perhaps offering too low a price in comparison to other bookmakers.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the percentage of total stake needed to value an outcome is not always straightforward to calculate. In some cases, it can be harder to identify an incoming bet with higher odds, for example, a draw with odds of 1.30.

How to calculate the total stake to value an outcome:

The total amount of stake needed to bet an outcome on a football match is calculated by multiplying the available odds on your chosen outcome by the percentage of total stake in the market taken by the bookmaker.

So, if we are betting on ‘Blackpool’ to win this match and the odds are available to 4/5 on ‘Blackpool’, then the stake needed is 5 x 4 = 20%.

You can work out your total stake needed by dividing 20% of 40% by 4 = 16.6%.

Stake needed to win each bet:

Stake needed to win each bet, on average, per bet depends on the quality of the bet and the odds being offered. This is the same as the fraction mentioned above.

The following example should be Hideki Rome’s Super Bowl bets. He is an odds-on favorite to win the bet at +12. It is hardly a surprise to see that the odds to win the bet are around 3:1 at this stage in the betting. If he wins the bet, it is bet again, again with the same stake. Same thing happened for the next bet.

Another football bet withRonme offers -2, +2, -2, -1, 0, +1, -1, +1, -1, +2, -2, -2, +2, +3, -3, +3, -3, +4, -4, +4, +5, -5, +5, +6, -6, +6, +7, -7, -7, +8, +8, +9, +9, +10, +11, +12.

The conclusion is clear: the fewer the number of teams in the betting pool, the more ‘bookie-like’ the price you will have to pay to win a bet. Taking away two bets from the pool reduces your profit to 10% (with the stake of one bet being $10).

There are many other aspects of betting, especially on the internet, and the examples given here should be enough to get you started.