Liqqa

Hi everyone!

My name is Jonas Gjelstad and some of you might know me as Liqqa.

I have been grinding mid-high stakes PLO for some years now and has over the past year started focusing more on sports-betting and working with my startup www.edgebet.net

I thought it might interest some of you to have a better understanding of how the pricing works and how to avoid placing obvious -ev bets when you’re just looking for a sweat in a game you want to watch.

I will try to keep this as basic as possible and if anyone have more advanced questions, i’ll be happy to answer those below.

So how do you know whether a bet is +ev or -ev?
I would advice everyone to start looking for market deviations in by looking at the asian bookmakers (Pinnacle sports, IBC, SBO and ISN) being the main bookmakers.
The reason why I use asian bookmakers is because they let everyone bet with them and have the same limits for winning and loosing bettors and will adjust the odds if more bets is placed on one side than the other.

I’m gonna use one example from basketball to get started:
Lets say Golden State Warriors are playing Boston Celtics at home and the odds on Pinnacle (I choose to use Pinnacle for this as they have the highest limits on NBA) the opening line might be Golden State Warriors -13 priced at 1.952 and Boston Celtics +13 also at 1.952 with a $10k wagering limit on both sides.
If someone choose to bet $10k on Boston +13 then Pinnacle will adjust their odds their odds on Boston down to 1.909 and increase the odds on GSW to 2.00. If someone against choose to bet $10k on Boston at 1.909 it will go down to 1.869 and GSW -13 increase to 2.05.
When one line is that big of a favourite they realise that the most fair line in this scenario might be GSW -12.5 and Boston +12.5. So they will open that line with the new odds at 1.952 on both sides.
How I view it at this time is that since the odds is equal on both sides, it means that they both have a 50% chance at winning at that price. And as there was some movements I know that a lot of the bookmakers such as Pokerstars, Unibet, William Hill etc is behind on moving their odds. Lets say for this example that Pokerstars were offering 2.10 at Boston +12.5 while Pinnacle had them at 1.952.
The correct odds would then be 2.00 given that it was a 50% chance for both sides to win.
I can do a simple math to calculate what my return would be: 2.10/2.00=1.05
That means I have found a bet with a 5% edge and that I’m looking at a 5% return on my bet here given that the odds on Pinnacle is 100% accurate. As the tendency has been on Boston it might go down more and it might backfire, but with this current information I’m happy to go ahead and place a bet at 2.10 on Boston +12.5.
I have realised over the past year that you cannot be certain, but same for poker you can use ranges and even though you’re sometimes behind, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong.
Same goes for reading the markets in betting that sometimes after making a bet the lines will change and go against you, but more often than not, you’ll end up with a profitable bet.

I feel this could be a good start to make you understand how simple it is to use the markets to find +ev bets and look forward to share more of my thoughts.