Superbowl XLV
I know nothing about American Football. I've never watched a game of American Football. However, with all the hype and the struggle to find anything to put into a cross-sport treble for Monday, has left me wanting a bet on this.
I've decided to approach the game from a "value" perspective, using a combination of statistics, which have some rather interesting results.
If you pool all of the games played in the regular (17 week) season together, Green Bay Packers' total score would be 388-240 and Pittsburgh Steelers would be 375-224. The Steelers score 13 less points, but concede 16 less. Pretty well matched. When you delve deeper into the stats, it reveals that GBP score 63.3% of the points in each game in which they are involved - Steelers 61.9%.
Obviously if the two sides met, they couldn't both take over 50% of the points, so the adjustment would mean that if GBP and PS played each other, GBP would take 49.7% of the points and PS 50.3%. Pretty tight. From this limited data set, we can imply that Packers have a 49.7% chance of winning the game and PS 50.3%. The implied "fair" odds would be GBP @ 2.01 and PS @ 1.99. If anyone offers odds greater than this, then it should be considered a value bet. At time of writing, the following prices were available at Paddy Power - GBP @ 1.66 and PS @ 2.25.
Green Bay Packers are much shorter than expected, Pittsburgh Steelers are available at a few ticks bigger than I believe they should be. If I was looking for a single bet, I would probably lay GBP - as the return is greater than the risk. As it's going to form part of a multiple, I'll be backing, not laying.
Conclusion: Pittsburgh Steelers @ 2.25 to win the Superbowl. Will I be watching? No.
Paddy Power: The Profit
The profit match for the Paddy Power bet today was Inverness CT vs Morton. The draw was available to back at 4.2 (little over 3/1) and to lay at Betfair at 4.4 - a nice little arb.
Total profit from Paddy Power: £13.97.
Matched Betting isn’t easy
Nothing in this game is easy, as the blog shows so far!
Paddy Power but a block on my account overnight, so it's lucky that Crawley failed to beat Kettering tonight, at least they aren't withholding winnings, just my free bet. I have to verify details with a long list of utility bills, etc. The only thing I wasn't happy about sending was a photo of the front and rear of my debit card - why on earth would they want that? Anyway, that's still ongoing, we'll have to see how long it takes them to sort me out!
In matched betting, it's far better to keep winning on your exchange lay bets on Betfair, as when you find a bet with good odds, more often than not it's at the higher end of the odds chart and your Betfair liabilty for the lay will be huge. If you keep winning at Betfair, then your account balance is topped up each time, so you only have to deposit into each bookmaker, rather than waiting days for a withdrawal to come through.
There's also a trade-off between getting the most profit out of each matched bet and how many days away the best market price match is. I normally look up to three days in advance to bag my bonus. That way you'll usually hit midweek and weekend football, amongst many other sports that are on midweek. I try to make my first bet on something the same day as the deposit, then will bag the bonus within four days.