If you’ve ever been enticed to gamble at a casino, you’ll understand how bookmakers and casinos stack on you. The best example of this is roulette in which there are 36 red and black numbers as well as the green numbers (0 and (in the U.S.) the number 00. So that’s 38 possibilities in all. If you are betting on red or black the odds of making a decision rightly are 18/38. a fair payout for a $1 stake is $2.111. The house, however, pays only $2 and keeps the difference. In that way it can guarantee itself that it will earn a profit.
Similar biases are evident in the odds offered by bookmakers on soccer, horse races, and all other sporting events. Bookmakers including 유로88 always make sure odds are favorable to them. But determining the odds for these games are more difficult than for roulette, as the calculations are more difficult.
And that raises a tantalizing possibility. Is it possible to create an easier method of calculating the odds and outdo the betting houses?
Today, we have a solution because of the efforts of Lisandro Kaunitz from the University of Tokyo and a group of colleagues, who have found a way to earn a steady income from the online betting market for soccer.
However, their work has a serious restriction. Kaunitz and co. state that once the bookmakers realised of this success, they prevented the researchers from betting further.
Gamblers have played around with ways to beat odds, but the success rate is rare. Because bookmakers put in a lot of effort to calculate precise odds. They typically have teams of statisticians to study the historical records of a particular sport such as soccer, and then create sophisticated models to determine the most appropriate odds for every game.
Kaunitz and co say that, as far as they know, nobody has been able beat this system by constructing better statistical algorithms.
But despite this sophisticated approach, there is a weakness in the way bookmakers work. It’s related to the method they use to make bets more secure against the risk of big payouts.
For instance, when two teams play a game of soccer, bookmakers determine the odds for each team to record either a loss or win or draw. Sometimes large numbers of people could bet on a specific result for reasons independent of the odds. The team may be more popular than they expected, for example. In such a case the bookmaker is scheduled for a big payout in the event this outcome occurs.
Thus, bookmakers can protect their bets by offering better odds on the other outcome. This way, they attract bets that cover at least a portion of potential losses.
Kaunitz and co. claim that this method also provides an opportunity for anybody able to detect it. The trick they have perfected is to devise an approach that consistently identifies chances favoring the punter over than the bookie.
The method they employ is simple. They begin by assuming bookies themselves are proficient at predicting odds, and that their prices reflect the probability of a draw, win or loss, in addition to their margin.
In this case an accurate measure of these probabilities is a simple average of the odds given by the bookies in general–a type of wisdom of the crowd. This gives the average odds that Kaunitz and co say is a remarkably accurate representation of the actual odds.
Then it’s a simple matter to analyze all the odds available and then to identify outliers. Kaunitz and co . will then figure to figure out how profitable the odds are. If they’re good enough, then the bet should make sense, at a minimum in the long term.
That’s precisely what Kaunitz and co . have done. They designed a Web crawler that aggregated odds offered by betting firms on soccer matches all over the world. They computed the odds average and identified any outliers and then determined if they would win or not.
Before investing any funds, the team of researchers tested the idea on 10 years worth of data on the closing odds and results of 479,440 soccer matches played between 2005 through 2015. This simulation paid out at 44 percent and resulted in a payout of 3.5 percent during the 10-year timeframe. “For an imagined stake of $50 per bet, this is an equivalent profit of $98,865 spread across 56,435 bets,” they say.
The most important thing to consider is whether this could have been pure chance. Could they simply have got lucky? So the team examined their results in comparison to 22,000 simulations in which they put bets in random on the identical games. In this case, the bets returned 39 percent of time at the rate of -3.2 percent and that’s equivalent to a loss of $93,000.
This enabled the team to calculate the likelihood that their first performance was a fluke. “The possibility of achieving an amount greater than $98,865 for 56,435 bets using an arbitrary betting strategy is less than 1 in a billion” they claim.
This gave Kaunitz and his team a reason to believe that their strategy would be effective in real life However, there was one issue. Normal punters are not able to always place bets on odds of the game, which can vary significantly from the odds that are offered in the lead-up to a game.
So Kaunitz and co . decided to test this as well. “We chose to conduct an more realistic simulation, that involved placing bets with odds ranging from 1 to 5 minutes prior to the start of each game,” they say.
The way odds fluctuate in the run-up to games is not publicly accessible The team therefore developed a bot that collected these odds from betting websites around the world from September 2015 to the end of February 2016. Then , they tried their method in this data set.
The outcomes were much better. Their bets returned 47.6 per cent of the time. They also earned an 9.9 percent return. “If every bet placed was $50, our plan would have brought in $34,932 of profit over 6,994 bets” they write.
A random betting method based on the same information yielded a return of 0.2 percent and a profit of $825. That could be the result of the fierce competition between online betting companies that sometimes offer better odds to attract gamblers in a kind loss-leader policy.
Next, the team tried the strategy using a technique known as “paper trading” that is, they make bets with fictitious information instead of historical data. This is important because it allows them to determine whether the odds mentioned are actually available with an online bookmaker.
They discovered that about 30% of the time that odds were changed when they attempted to check online. In those cases, they discarded the bet.
However, the strategy was profitable. Three months after trading on paper and betting, they retuned their bets to the profit to 5.5 percent, earning $1,128.50 on bets that were 407 and $50.
“At this point, we’ve made the decision to make bets using actual money.” claim Kaunitz and Co.
Then they repeated the strategy over five months, using similar methods, but with the difference that a human operator would actually place a $50 bet on the internet after analyzing the odds. In that time the bets they placed paid off 47.2 percent of the time. Additionally, they made $957.50 over 265 bets. That’s an impressive yield of 8.5 percent.
If you’re looking for a clue, the number of bets they placed was much lower than during the period of paper trading. “The reason for this is that we didn’t have a dedicated operator betting on every opportunity available throughout the day, and as a result we missed many of the bets that were offered,” they say.
But the smaller number of bets didn’t matter. “Our trades on paper and the actual betting activity confirmed the success of the strategy” Kaunitz and co. Kaunitz as well as co.
It’s an innovative approach with an interesting result. Kaunitz and co found an Achilles’s heel in the world of betting and used it to earn their own money.
Their story is not without the sting of. “Although we followed the sports betting industry rules however, within a couple of months we started placing bets using actual bookmakers started to severely limit account access,” says the group.
The bookies often limited the stakes they were willing to bet on or suggested that they conduct a “manual examination” of the bet prior to accepting it. In these situations it was impossible for the team to make their bets.
If the bookmakers chose the bets to be questioned randomly this shouldn’t have affected the financial success of the strategy. However, Kaunitz and his colleagues say that it’s unlikely, and the bookmakers’ actions could have severely affected them. “Under these circumstances we could not pursue your betting method,” they say.
Kaunitz and company are clearly discontent: “The sports betting industry is allowed to promote and provide odds to its clients, but those clients will lose, and should they be successful they could be barred in their betting.”
The team points out the fact that this type of activity could be illegal. “Advertising products or services with the intention not to sell them as promoted, and/or advertising products or services that are not intended to meet a reasonable demand however with the intent to make the consumer purchase another product (a practice often called ‘bait’ or ‘bait and switch’ marketing) is considered to be false advertising and carries pecuniary sanctions across the U.K., Australia, and the United States of America,” According to the team.
And they call on governments to effectively regulate the gambling industry and to prevent this kind of practice in the near future.
How well this approach will work is not clear. But the results are intriguing however.
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