subject: The Best Way to Bet a Soccer Game [print this page] The Best Way to Bet a Soccer Game The Best Way to Bet a Soccer Game
Football Punditry and Tips include a great many ideas on how to bet your favorite soccer team. But fundamentally in order to make a little money or even break even you need to find overlays on the betting odds. This is when the odds offered to the bettor are slightly different than the probability of the team winning or losing.
In general a bookmaker will set the odds of the game, but these initial odds are based not so much on the probability of the outcome of the game as it is the betting patterns of the public. The payoffs are based upon booking bets at more than one hundred percent, so that whoever wins their bet, they are paid with the losing betters wagers with something leftover for the bookmaker.
Therefore the opening odds of a good bookmaker are usually well tuned to public betting patterns. Naturally they are not exact and small changes in the odds are made to balance the two sides of the betting proportion. The public as a whole is a remarkable handicapper and their wagers in aggregate are an accurate calculation of the probabilities of the game's outcome.
There are certain situations when the odds will be off and a sharp bettor can take advantage of the situation. One classic example is when people are betting with their heart and not their head. A home team favorite that is out-matched, or popular teams at the national level are often over bet. At other times a team may be more focused on club tournaments and matches that are taking place outside of their country's league play. This can be seen on occasion in the Champions League in Europe where the previous season's champion is all out in European Club competition but is not playing their best in national league play. These teams are often over bet, even when gamblers have noticed that they are not playing at the top of their game.
The best way to determine whether an overlay is being created is to make your own odds line. This takes practice, but once it can be done, you need only compare your line to the public's, and you can spot the best bets. In general you must make a power rating or ranking for soccer teams. These should always be league specific and calculated from the most recent three or four games. As long as they are games from a specific league play, you will always be comparing a team's recent performance from the same pool of competition.
