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It’s interesting to see how public sentiment can change leading up to a match.
Liverpool host Arsenal on Wednesday morning in the English Premier League.
On April 15 I placed a wager through Sports Alive for Liverpool to beat Arsenal with odds of 2.10. Yesterday SportsBet was offering 1.85 for Arsenal to draw or beat Liverpool. If you sum the inverses of those odds (1/2.10 + 1/1.85) you get 1.017. Because it’s greater than 1.00 an arbitrage opportunity didn’t exist, but one was close, so I have been keeping an eye on the odds ever since.
I checked back today and found that SportsBet is offering 1.95 for Arsenal to draw or win, while Sports Alive is offering 2.00. Both of these odds offer an arbitrage opportunity alongside my original bet, but of course using the 2.00 odds provides better value.
Unfortunately, my original bet with Liverpool was modest, but I have entered into the arbitrage opportunity anyway, so I will be guaranteed a risk free profit. To make things more interesting, if had I bet $1,000 on Liverpool to begin with, my arbitrage opportunities, as calculated using the Two-outcome Arbitrage Calculator, would be as follows:
| | | No Arbitrage | | | Unbiased Arbitrage | | | Biased Arbitrage | |
| | | | | | | ||||
| Liverpool Bet | | | $2,050.00 | | | $1,000.00 | | | $1,025.00 |
| | | | | | | ||||
| Arsenal Bet | | | $0.00 | | | $1,050.00 | | | $1,025.00 |
| | | | | | | ||||
| Total Bets | | | $2,050.00 | | | $2,050.00 | | | $2,050.00 |
| | | | | | | ||||
| Profit if Liverpool Wins | | | $4,305.00 | | | $50.00 | | | $102.50 |
| | | | | | | ||||
| Profit if Ars. Wins or Draws | | | $-2,050.00 | | | $50.00 | | | $0.00 |
If I had made an original $1,000 bet on Liverpool and had entered into an unbiased arbitrage bet, I would have been guaranteed at a $50.00 profit.
It just goes to show the merits of making early bets on events. While I really like SportsBet, one of its downsides is it tends to be slow on providing betting options for upcoming events. I find agencies like Sports Alive and Betfair offer odds much earlier, which enables opportunities like this one to arise. If you can pick the best value odds and the odds move enough in your favour, you can reap a profit before the match even starts!
Update: Sports Alive is now offering 2.08 for Arsenal to win or draw. Talk about a huge odds shift. Punters seem to be heavily favouring Liverpool.
If Sports Alive keeps jumping in with early odds like this, I highly recommend you get an account with them! It’s not often you see a betting agency offer odds on a match where one of the teams involved had another game to be played beforehand. In this case, Arsenal were involved in the FA Cup against Chelsea, with Robin van Persie and Emmanuel Adebayor ruled out with injury after the game.
Update: Liverpool drew Arsenal 4-4! I feel good about my decision to accept the arbitrage opportunity now!
I don’t know why I haven’t gotten into them sooner, but I am making more and more use of multibets at the moment.
Multibets are bets that pay out based on the results of more than one event. In its simplest form, you can create a multibet that pays out only if every team you have selected wins. Multibets are a great way to increase the payout for multiple event betting, but they are much riskier.
Parlay betting is made available by agencies like Sports Alive where some, but not all of your bets need to win to obtain a payout. This mitigates some risk, but requires a greater investment because multiple bets are required. Parlay betting involves a pretty funky nomenclature based on the nature of the multibet, which includes terms like Trixie, Patent, Yankee, Lucky 15, Heinz, and so on.
This article will focus on the simplest of multibets, where you must get every result right to achieve a payout.
Let’s say it’s the first round of a tennis tournament and you are presented with a range of low odds bets for the major players:
Djokovic to win his match – 1.12
Nadal to win his match – 1.02
Murray to win his match – 1.20
Federer to win his match – 1.15
If you placed four individual bets on these results at $25 each, and all four players had won you would have received:
Djokovic win – $3.00
Nadal win – $0.50
Murray win – $5.00
Federer win – $3.75
The total winnings would be $12.25, which equates to 1.1225 odds on a $100 bet.
If, however you made a multibet that paid out only if all four players won, the odds would calculated as the individual odds multiplied by each other: 1.12 x 1.02 x 1.20 x 1.15 = 1.58.
So if you had made a $100 multibet instead and got all four results correct you would have a profit of $58 instead of $12.25.
As you can see, multibets provide a much greater payout if you get the results correct. Keep in mind, however that if one or more of these players hadn’t won, you would have received a loss of $100, whereas with individual bets, you would still have received winnings from the other matches. For this reason, multibets provide greater payouts with greater risk.
I typically used multibets for low odds bets like in early rounds of tennis tournaments. If you are looking for a big payout, you can combine two or more high odds bets to create a potentially huge profit. For example, a multibet this weekend for West Brom to beat Manchester City (6.00), West Ham to beat Aston Villa (6.00) and Hull City to beat Sunderland (4.40), would have odds of 158.40. A $10 bet would have a potential profit of $1,574!
The following is a review of the betting agency Sports Alive. I will update this review periodically to keep the details up to date. The Betting Agencies section provides information and reviews for other sports betting agencies.
Sports Alive is the new name for a number of merged betting agencies, including GlobalSportsBet and Sportsacumen. It is an Australian company with its headquarters in Canberra.
