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Since time immortal, among the favorite pastimes of sport freaks has been gambling. Gambling is exciting, thinking about the risk involved, the luck factor and the chance to make big money in a few of hours. Online gambling is now popular with millions of men and women throughout the world, with more visiting betting sites and online casinos popping up on the web than ever before. One great benefit from having this facility online is as always, that it is accessible from any place which has an active internet access. This has made gambling a sport in itself, available to millions of new people.
There is a boom in the online betting industry as well as the kind of profits many sites are enjoying now is unimaginable. Online casinos are not to be left behind, as there’s been a rapid explosion of these also. Actually, online poker gives gambling, a glamour quotient by roping in celebrities for high profile tournaments. What this means is reaching out to a whole new market in itself.
But keep in mind, the most successful story will be the rise of sports betting. Fans who have enjoyed betting on games like soccer, football, polo, baseball, hockey and horse racing, can now do so online with the help of these sites. A whole new variety of professional sports are cropping up to encourage the already soaring popularity of online betting. It may be correct to say that audiences are now enjoying the betting experience without being at the field themselves. Welcome to the world of virtual reality.
You can find innumerable so-called gambling experts willing to dish out information of their systems to ‘beat the bookie’ or to make a second income from gambling, for a price of course. I won’t do that. I will simply give you information about bookmakers, odds and gambling that you should use (or forget) when you see fit.
The very first thing to mention is that the vast majority of people who engage in gambling will be net losers over-time. This really is the very reason you can find numerous bookmakers making so much money throughout the world.
While bookmakers can sometimes take big hits, for example if a favourite wins the Grand National, they spread their risk so widely and they setup markets that incorporate a margin, so they are going to always make a profit over the medium to long term, if not the short-run. That is, as long since they got their sums right.
When setting their odds for a particular event, bookmakers must first assess the probability of that event occurring. To do this they us various statistical models based on data collated over years, sometime decades, about the sport and team/competitor in question. Remember, if sport was 100% predictable, it will soon lose its appeal, and while the bookies will often be spot on with their assessments of the probability of an event, they can be sometimes way off the mark, simply because a match or contest goes against conventional wisdom and statistical likelihood.
Just look at any sport and you will find an occasion in the event the underdog triumphs against all of the odds, literally. Wimbledon beating the then mighty Liverpool in the FA Cup Final of 1988, for example, or even the United States of America beating the then mighty USSR at ice hockey in the 1980 Olympics are two illustrations of whenever you might have got handsome odds on the underdog. And could have won a decent wedge.
The big bookmakers spend a great deal of money and time ensuring they possess the right odds that ensure they take under consideration the perceived probability of the event, and after that add that extra little bit that gives them the profit margin. So if an event has a probability of, say, 1/3, the odds that reflect that probability will be 2/1. That is, two to one against that event occurring.
Conversely, a bookie who set these odds would, over time, break even (assuming their stats are correct). So instead they will set the odds at, say, 6/4. In this particular way they have built in the margin that ensures, over time, they’re going to make the most of people betting on this selection. It’s the same concept as a casino roulette.
Now how can you spot the occasions when bookmakers have got it wrong? Well, it’s easier she said than done, but far from impossible.
One of the ways is to get very good at mathematical modelling and set up a model that takes into mind as many of the variables that affect the outcome of an event as possible. The problem with this tactic is that however complex the model, and however all encompassing it seems, it can never account for the minutiae of variables relating to individual human states of mind. Whether a golfer manages to hole a major-winning five foot putt on the 18th at St Andrews it really is as much down to their concentration as to the weather or day of the week. In addition, the maths can start getting pretty darn complicated.
Alternatively you can find yourself a sporting niche. Bookmakers will concentrate their resources on the events that produce them the most money, generally found to be football (soccer), American football and horse racing. So trying to beat the bookies while betting on a Manchester United v Chelsea match will be tough. Unless you work with one of the clubs, or are married to among the players or managers, it’s very likely the bookmaker setting the odds shall have more details than you.
