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1. Establishing the "Soccer Ball Isn't Round, Maximizing Profits" Theory
I brought up the theory that the soccer ball isn't round first because it's a premise for predicting soccer matches. This is firstly a fact, which might be hard for some naive fans to accept, but it indeed exists. When Asian gambling just started to rise, the manipulation of certain match results by Southeast Asian big syndicates was already a well-known secret. Before that, in the UK, as a country with highly developed football matches and football betting industry, was also the birthplace of match-fixing. Some match outcomes had their odds lowered by bookmakers just before the game, resulting in bizarre upsets. Such match results became increasingly common and are now commonplace. How else can we explain the strange events like the 1998 World Cup final with Brazil's team-wide underperformance? How can we explain the Liverpool vs. AC Milan Champions League final where Liverpool miraculously equalized after being three goals down? "The soccer ball is round" became the best excuse for bookmakers to cover themselves. The soccer ball isn't round! It can be manipulated, it can be predicted! And who predicts football matches most accurately? It's undoubtedly the bookmakers, because they are omnipotent, with great control, as evidenced by the fact that even the famous British media "The Sun" and the English and Scottish police cannot track the footsteps of bookmakers. Therefore, it's not surprising that bookmakers control one or two matches. If bookmakers can stage a World Cup final, what else is impossible? Furthermore, the match-fixing theory mentioned above only accounts for a small number of matches. Most matches with a strong tendency are predicted by the bookmakers through their teams of actuaries using calculations. And the probability of these tendencies being correct is high. According to the narrative in "Southeast Asian Bookmakers", around 10 out of 100 matches are ones where bookmakers are over 90% confident, and around 40 matches are ones where bookmakers have 60%-70% confidence based on their predictions. The remaining 50 matches are simply adjusted by the bookmakers based on the volume of bets received. Since I haven't specifically compiled the numbers and it's impossible for me to do so, as I'm not a bookmaker, but this figure is also reliable. After all, match-fixing is rare, and most matches with specific tendencies are predicted by bookmakers. Regardless of whether it's match-fixing or bookmakers accurately predicting matches, one thing that deserves recognition is that the bookmakers' level of control over matches far exceeds our imagination, much more so than our own confidence. Therefore, bookmakers manipulate the odds to induce us to bet and maximize their profits.
In this context, we need to understand the bookmakers' profit model. Whether it's European odds or Asian handicaps, whether it's European bookmakers or Asian bookmakers, theoretically, the profit of a bookmaker comes from extracting the vig. What does extracting the vig mean? First, we need to understand how odds are set. I've already discussed in my blog post "An Analysis of Standard Odds" that bookmakers calculate the probabilities of each team winning, drawing, or losing through meticulous formulas, and then set the odds based on these probabilities. This probability calculation is quite precise and very scientific, and it can be verified by a large number of matches. Moreover, this probability is quite close to the actual distribution of betting funds in real life! Let's take an example: in a match between Losos and Ohannes, a certain bookmaker calculates the probabilities of home win, draw, and away win as 47.57%, 27.98%, and 24.45%, respectively. This probability is quite close to the real distribution of betting funds! Since the vig for this bookmaker is 5%, the payout rate is 95%. Then this bookmaker will set the odds for home win, draw, and away win as: 95% / 47.57% = 2.00, 95% / 27.98% = 3.40, 95% / 24.45% = 3.88. After setting these odds, if bets are placed at these odds, the distribution of funds for each result will be very close to their win-draw-lose probabilities. Therefore, regardless of which result occurs, the bookmaker will stably pay out only 95% of the betting funds as winnings and stably extract 5% of the vig. This is how a bookmaker theoretically operates. Now let's take a look at how Asian handicaps work. Similarly, the bookmaker will first calculate the win-draw-lose probabilities as 47.57%, 27.98%, and 24.45%, respectively. Since the probabilities of home win and (draw/away win) are roughly equal, the bookmaker will set a half-ball handicap to separate home win and (draw/away win) onto two different odds. So the odds will be set as: Losos 2.0, Ohannes 1.95 (note that the odds for the half-ball handicap are the same as the odds for the home win). Since the upper bet chips are about 47.57% and the lower bet chips are about 52.43%, whether the upper bet chips or the lower bet chips are placed, the book |
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Post time 27-4-2024 21:11:27