Football Pools - Arbitrage Betting
Arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a difference in price between two or more markets. It is striking a combination of matching deals that capitalise on the imbalance, with the profit being the difference between the two market prices. When related to internet bookmakers, sports arbitrage is where lots of internet bookmakers offer odds on the outcome of the same event.
Any single bookmaker will weight their odds so that no one customer can cover all outcomes at a profit against them. In real terms what this means is that if you use One bookmaker and bet two different bets on the same game you will win, but you won’t make a profit. However, if you look across the board at lots of different betting sites and find the best odds in each direction on that game, it is sometimes possible to place your bets in such a way that with the correct staking a profit is guaranteed whatever the result of the match. When this happens, the book for the person placing the bets is said to be ‘overbroke’ and the bet is known as an arbitrage or a sure win or sure bet.
Finding bets to create an arbitrage isn’t always easy, and sometimes isn’t possible, but with fixed odds sports betting such as football pools it is sometimes possible, but you’ll need to understand a few things like what overround is, and how bookmakers work.
When a bookmaker sets up their bets they do it in such a way that each end of the bet never quite adds up to 100%. This is done in order for them to make a profit. It doesn’t stop people from winning, but it is what stops people from placing both ends of the bet with the one bookmaker and coming out even or in profit. Overbroke is where you effectively beat the odds of overround by placing one end of the bet with one bookmaker and the other end of the bet with a different bookmaker at combined odds which mean that you are guaranteed to make money on the deal.
In actual fact you generally have to place a three part bet with a football match in order to create overbroke as there is the chance of a draw as well as a win or a loss. So you’d be brokering deals with three different bookmakers. The frequency with which the opportunity for arbitrage occurs is fairly low because each individual bookmaker is careful not to go against the overall tide of opinion in how they price a sporting event bet. Having said that, because of the vast number of sport betting events taking place each week, even with only one in a hundred or less bets being capable of overbroke that still means that there are in fact quite a number of sure bets to be found every week.
