Value is, surprisingly, a somewhat misunderstood term within betting. It is often mistakenly used to mean a selection which is simply a big price. In many cases, this selection should be an even bigger price and doesn’t represent value. A value bet is simply when the odds taken underestimate that team’s or player’s real chance of winning. Consistently place value bets and you will win in the long term, though variance means there will be losing sequences within that time. Consistently place bets which are bad value and you will lose over the long term, even if some runs during that period suggest otherwise.

 

Let’s say that you have priced up a Rugby Union Handicap. The match involves Wasps at home against Sale. You make the line 4 in favour of Wasps. Now, you might think Wasps will win the match. You might have a strong urge to bet on them on the handicap. However, it’s all about what the line should be. You should be betting numbers, not teams. There should be a line (and odds) at which you would be prepared to bet on Wasps and another line and odds for which Sale would merit an investment. Maybe, you feel you want a four-point difference between your line and a bookmaker’s line before you will have a bet at 10/11. Maybe three points will suffice. Or perhaps it’s three points in a close game, but you’d want more of a difference if one team is a very big favourite.

 

If you require a three-point difference between your line and the bookmaker’s before striking a bet, this means that you should be prepared to back Wasps -1 if the odds are 10/11. Or, you should be happy to back Sale if they are receiving a 7-point head-start. You shouldn’t accept Wasps -2, or Sale +6 if you’ve deemed that you need a three-point discrepancy to make a bet. If the line doesn’t conform to your criteria, move on to the next game, and bet only on games which fit the bill. Don’t simply bet one side because you fancy them to win. If you feel they have a better chance than the market thinks, then this should be reflected in the line you have come up with.

 

Similarly, if you price up a horse race, compile the odds so that they add up to 100%, i.e. the true chance of each horse winning, without the margin which bookmakers add to each selection. Having done so, if you make a horse a 7/2 chance and you can find 11/2 available, you should place a bet. Don’t simply back the 15/8 favourite in the race which you feel represents no value, just because it is the likeliest winner of the race. It’s all about betting on selections whose chance have been underestimated by the market. That’s what it takes to win in the long term.

 

But when reassessing the previous bets you’ve placed, how can you be sure that a wager was value? What criteria can you use to discern this? It’s the downfall of many bettors to consider that any winning bet must have been a good selection, and any losing wager must have been misguided. However, this isn’t the case on an individual basis. Consider a fair coin flip. If you placed a bet on the coin landing on heads at 4/5 and it was a winning bet, it would still be a bad bet, as the true probability was 50/50 and you bet it as if it had a 55.56% chance of happening. Obviously, in the long term, over a sample size of thousands of bets, you need to be winning, otherwise, you are doing something wrong, but one individual result doesn’t determine a good or bad bet. It’s very important in betting, to think about decisions, rather than outcomes.

 

One method for defining if a previous bet represented value is whether the price you took beat the ‘closing line.’ For US sports this might be the Pinnacle line at the start of the match; for Horse Racing it might be the starting price (SP,) or Betfair SP. For other sports, the last pre-match back and lay prices on the Betfair Exchange could be used. In-play bets are more difficult to quantify as to whether they were value, but either the Betfair Exchange price, or the odds at bet365 at the time the wager was struck, would be a good marker. If you place bets on the College Basketball Point Spread and find that, on average, the line moves 3 points in the direction that you played by tip-off, then you stand a good chance of defying the 10/11 odds that you may encounter. Beating the closing line is considered one of the key metrics for a winning customer at Pinnacle, long renowned as a sharp betting company. Many betting experts — such as NFL judge Scott Kellen — list whether the line they advised customers to take beat the closing line, right alongside whether the bet was a winning or losing one.

 

Match action can be useful in defining how good your bet was. Even if your selection was a loser, if you feel that match action suggests your read on the match, race, or other event was correct then the bet wasn’t necessarily a poor one. For example, you backed a golfer, win only at 33/1 since that player has a poor record of being placed in tournaments and the win odds represented better value. Your selection got off to a strong start, aided by benign weather conditions which you felt would favour players with an early tee time. He continually traded lower than 33/1 throughout the tournament. However, at no point did you think your charge was a price where it was value to hedge or cash out your bet. So, you let the bet run, only to see your selection narrowly miss out on the spoils. Match, or tournament action, suggests you had a good bet.

 

Lastly — and this criterion can take much longer to come to fruition — future events can be a useful barometer of how good a bet was. Consider an NFL bet where you backed Carolina, at Tampa Bay. You bet them at +6, and they lost by 7, despite dominating the match. Three weeks later these same two divisional foes met again, with little change in starting line-ups and similar form in the interim. Now at home, Carolina was a three-point favourite. The line had been adjusted by 9 points from the first game to the second, even though the swing in home advantage from one team to the other is only 5 or 6 points (home advantage being worth approximately 2.5 points in the NFL, though 3 is often suggested.) This line adjustment could suggest that odds compilers and bettors shared your view that Carolina represented value in the previous meeting between these two teams and that you had a good value wager.

 

Of course, scheduling of games doesn’t often afford such a quick rematch, but future results can give a good guide as to whether a previous wager was a shrewd one.

 

To facilitate getting value, it’s important to have accounts with all reputable bookmakers (I know some readers will see those words as an oxymoron!) I’d suggest that you should aim to open accounts with every traditional bookmaker on the oddschecker.com website. In addition, you should have access to at least two of the major betting exchanges (Betfair, Smarkets, Betdaq and Matchbook.) If you live in a country where you can place bets with Pinnacle or 5Dimes then you should also open accounts with these two firms. With this many bookmakers to choose from, shopping for lines, and getting value, becomes more straightforward.