While betting on football, or on any other sport for that matter, the first thing that you will have to decipher is the odds. In this article, we will try to understand what are odds in betting football?
Continue reading for more.
What are odds in betting football?
In the simplest terms, odds represent the probability or the possibility of an event to occur. There are a number of ways in which odds are presented, depending on which part of the world you reside in. But the basic aim of giving odds is to give the punters a means to compare the chances of a certain event to occur.
How are odds represented?
There are three most popular ways of presenting odds. These are
- Fractional odds, which are most popular in the UK and Ireland
- This method is most popular in European countries
- Money line or American odds
How are odds determined
There is a lot of thinking and calculation that goes in to fix the odds for the result of a certain game or event to occur. Bookies look at historical data, current form, venue, weather, as well as data about which team the punters are backing, and a lot of other variables before fixing the odds.
Online sportsbooks use complex software and algorithms to determine the odds. This software is extremely powerful and works in real-time to fix the odds for events and match results. The odds may keep changing in the build-up to the game, and through the game, for live betting markets, as the betting patterns change.
Bookie’s edge
What are odds in betting football? While the odds represent percentage of the probability of events to occur, the sum total of these probabilities never adds up to 100%. This is because each odd has a `bookie’s edge´ built into it, so that no matter what the outcome is, the bookie never loses money.
