Sports Agent Suggestions 3
As nearly every professional bettor will tell you, backing heavy favourites is a sure fire way to the poorhouse. That is common knowledge, online gambling agency right? Perhaps, but there's one problem with that type of thinking: it's dead wrong.
The received wisdom will be the linesmakers skew their odds on heavy favourites because the public love betting on the top teams. The bookies undoubtedly see a flurry of parlays involving clubs like Chelsea, Barcelona and Juventus every weekend. Surely there is value in taking the underdog in these situations, isn't there?
The truth is, numerous studies have shown that blindly backing long shots is a losing proposition in the long-term. To see why that is the case, we have to discover how a bookmaker operates. Since the bookies take most of their action on short-priced favourites, it's often assumed they're exposed to big liabilities if all of the hot teams win. Even though this is sometimes the situation, and several bookmakers suffer months of huge losses, you will find a few ways a bookie can protect himself.
It is important to remember that most heavy favourites are combined in parlays involving at least three teams. A bookmaker only needs one loser to take his customer's money. For this reason, there is little need to lower the odds on a "public" team. Many sportsbooks will even inflate the odds of a hot favourite to attract new customers, safe within the knowledge that parlay players will not hurt their bottom line.
In the event the favourite's odds are an accurate reflection of it's true probability of winning, the bookmaker must make adjustments elsewhere. That usually means offering worse odds on the underdog as well as the draw. Knowing the concept of theoretical hold may make this clearer.
When making lines, a sportsbook will offer odds on each team which provide it a slight edge, ensuring a profit irrespective of how the game turns out. This really is called the Theoretical Hold and is expressed as a portion. It represents the combined amount of customers' bets that the bookmaker expects to keep.
It's called theoretical because in reality a bookmaker rarely has balanced action on all sides. If a bookie takes the majority of his bets on a heavy favourite, he can offer it at a far more generous price and accept a smaller profit margin. Short-priced favourites generally have small margins, but high volumes. Bigger odds mean bigger margins. There's little incentive for a bookie to offer competitive odds on a big underdog if he doesn't expect much betting interest in that team.
