How I profited 15% with sports betting in one weekend – 05/28/2023 – Sports

Navigating sports betting sites is more complicated than I thought. They are polluted, full of confusing information that flashes on the computer or cell phone screen and has updates all the time.

What are those numbers? What does the 2.55 associated with tennis player Daniil Medvedev, who would face Stefanos Tsitsipas at the Rome Open, mean? And the 1.53 linked to Flamengo, which would take Corinthians for the Brasileirão?

I think: while I take stock of the situation, I’ll just focus on the sports I follow. But this is also more complicated than I imagined. Soon I’m risking money on the basketball league in the Dominican Republic and table tennis players in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Better take it easy. I will not complete my mission if I spend the R$ 100 that the newspaper released for me to try some of the main sports betting sites in the country.

There are many, so I look for a criterion. How about the sponsors of the biggest football championships involving Brazil, in addition to the site that has its name on more teams from series A and B?

I reserve the weekend for that and register at Sportingbet (Copa Libertadores), Galera.Bet (Brazilian Championship), Betano (Copa do Brasil) and Esportes da Sorte (more teams).

I start with Sportingbet. I’m surprised with a 100% deposit bonus, up to a limit of R$300. I don’t have that much. I need to divide the R$ 100 between four sites.

Whatever. I spend a pix of R$ 25 and try to place the first bet. I am unable. An alert notifies me that, per the policies of the promotion, certain restrictions apply to my account. Only then do I read the bonus regulation, after having made the deposit. Genius.

The main rule concerns betting: I am prohibited from making predictions where I have, in Sportingbet’s calculations, more than a 50% chance of winning. That is, I cannot choose favorites.

Sports betting sites are not NGOs. They want to make money. And they do this whenever punters miss the guess. For example, if I choose team A and it wins, the site pays me a predefined amount. If team A draws or loses, the site keeps the stake.

Hence why, from the site’s point of view, it makes sense to prevent me from playing on favorites. After all, they are more likely to win, which means more chance of me winning, which means more chance of the site having to pay me.

Schooled with the prank, I reject bonuses from other platforms. I want freedom to define my strategy. And she will be conservative: only small bets – a maximum of R$ 5 – and always on favorites, preferably with more than 80% chance of winning.

And how do I know what the chances are? That’s where quotes, or odds, come in.

How the odds work

The odds are the price of the bet, or, in other words, the amount that the site can pay for each R$ 1 invested. In general, they appear in the form of a number ranging from 1.01 to 20, but nothing prevents it from going over 100.

Thus, the 2.55 associated with Medvedev indicates that, if I put BRL 1 on him and he wins, the site will pay me BRL 2.55, including the value of my bet – a profit of BRL 1.55.

The lower the odd, or quotation, the greater the favoritism; the greater the odd, the greater the underdog. Of course, the site wants to pay me as little as possible if I bet on someone with a good chance of winning and wants to encourage me to bet on someone with a good chance of losing.

To understand the degree of favoritism implicit in an odd, just resort to an equation: 1 divided by the odd multiplied by 100 = percentage of chance. While it’s not an exact science, quotes generally don’t differ much between sites.

Here we go: 1 divided by 2.55 multiplied by 100 = 39.2%. The website was telling me that Medvedev only had this chance to beat Tsitsipas. As I thought the Russian was the favorite, I bet BRL 2.50 on the “zebra” and won almost BRL 4.

Another odd that caught my attention was 2.25 on the Miami Heat against the Boston Celtics. Only 44.4% chance of winning at home? I put in R$5 and made a profit of R$6.25.

Both situations help to understand how the sites calculate the odds. They analyze everything that can interfere with the result, such as the history of the match, recent performance, lineups, etc.

In the case of the NBA, Boston’s wins in the three previous games it played in Miami may have weighed; in tennis, Medvedev is not an expert on clay, the surface of Rome.

But if you ask me what made Polish table tennis player Szymon Radlo a favorite against Czech Adam Linek, or Cañeros an underdog against Titanes in Dominican Republic basketball, I will confess my ignorance.

As with the Medvedev and Miami hunches, I was just trying to get around the bonus restriction. In this case, placing multiple bets, a modality in which I choose more than one event at the same time and only win if I get all the results right. It decreases my chances but increases the prize.

I fell into table tennis and Dominican basketball by chance. I could have chosen more than 30 options, including darts, snooker and water polo, as well as virtual games.

I could also have chosen other types of bets. It is possible to predict not only the result of the confrontation but also the winner of the set, the difference in points between the teams, the scorer of the first goal, the total number of corners or red cards, etc.

The menu linked to a single sporting event can have more than 500 items, which, in theory, makes life relatively easy for anyone who wants to manipulate bets without showing their face.

But the enormity of offers exists for another reason. As in casinos, the apparent confusion creates the feeling that there is always something going on, that there is always someone winning, that it is always possible to bet again and profit more – or recover lost money.

That is why betting platforms are so dedicated to live games, including broadcasting on the site. As a match progresses, the odds are updated in real time.

Anyone who wants to can even interrupt the bet in the middle, either to pocket a profit or to cut losses.

For example, I put BRL 2.50 in a multiple guess: São Paulo, Flamengo and Cruzeiro would beat Vasco, Corinthians and Cuiabá, respectively. The potential profit would be more than BRL 7.50, but, to pass the rule in time for the report, I closed the bet before the last game and ended up with a gain of BRL 3.38.

In the end, adding the more than 30 bets I made, I ended up with R$ 140.08. If you deduct the BRL 25 bonus, that’s BRL 15.08 in profit, or 15% on the initial BRL 100. I didn’t secure the Sports editor’s retirement, but I didn’t spend the paper’s money.