Value Betting

For the purposes of this test we chose two sites which purport to identify value bets. The first is Odds Exchange and the second is Value Checker.

The theory of value betting is that sometimes bookmakers will offer odds that are too high for the real probability of that event actually happening. If you bet on these events then you are increasing the value of your bet, in the long run this means that you should make a profit.

Odds Exchange offers up 300 value bets at anyone time, from over 100 bookmakers. The reality is that they offer a paid service which has all the bookmakers, while their free service offers a smaller range of sportsbooks. For the purpose of this test we have chosen some of the more respectable bookmakers available to us. We have then selected bets which have a 40% or higher probability according to the site, with odds of 2.05 or higher. The theory suggests that after 100 bets we will see a profit of around 5-7%

Value Checker doesn’t specifically produce a list of value bets, instead the user has to trawl through all the available matches and identify the value bets from the colour coded value calculations. For the purpose of this test we have selected bets with a value of 0.4 or higher. The nature of the site is that the majority of bets on offer are under/over events, so we have limited our odds to between 1.3 and 4.0 inclusive. Again the theory suggests that we should see a profit of 5-7%

The results were intriguing, we don’t have access to the formulae that identify the value bets for each site, it may be that they are just identifying bookmakers who’s odds are out of line with other bookmakers.

Although for this test we were just publishing the odds exchange bets that had odds of 2.05 or above we did also record all the bets between 1.3 and 2.05. The results would have seen a massive loss of cash, which is why we stopped the test after 47 bets rather than continue till 100 had been reached.

The Value Checker selections saw a profit of 7.54 units after 100 bets, which is in line with the theory, and would suggest that their calculations are more accurate.

We will update this page with pretty graphs once we manage to get the spreadsheet fired up again.

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