Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series — What Is A Value Wager
Video Transcript Below
What is A Value Wager
Our ‘Sports Betting How To’ Series, explains the common questions around how does sports betting work? — this section covers What Is A Value Wager.
Specifically, what is value wagering & investing when it comes to strategy for sports betting.
Andrew Pace
Andrew is a Multi-Millionaire, Professional Sports Value Analyst & the Creator of inplayLIVE — an online program & community that teaches how to invest on live sports through the art of value wagering. He’s taught thousands of students to successfully beat the book and go on to reach 5, 6 and 7-figure profits.
Video Transcript
Ritzker: What would you say defines a value wager?
Pace: Right. So I think first and foremost, what's really important to understand is that big odds doesn't implicate value.
It could but it doesn't not necessarily.
There's a full sports betting community - and I'm not saying this is right - but they search for value. And the 1.5 to 1.7 range, like -200 to like -150 and American odds thinking that it's safe value.
And I'm not saying that's wrong.
That's just not what we do.
We define a value wager as a sports bet that's going to make us money over time instead of the sports book.
And the key word there is actually over time. It doesn't mean you're going to win it right now.
I get people asking, can you guarantee me a profit? That's crazy, it’s a bit of a stupid thing to ask. And when we call it investing, right, we refer to it as investing - investing being something that you do with the intent to to grow your money in the realm of risk.
This is the highest risk form of investing that you can pretty much put yourself on right up there with cryptocurrencies. Are you buying shorts on stocks or you can have unlimited, unlimited losses, day trading, that kind of stuff. So we definitely consider it to be investing because of that term valuation.
We will make money on value wagers over the long term as opposed to the traditional sports bet which makes the sports books in the casinos money over the long term.
So what that really means in a more technical sense is you are getting better odds on the price than the sports book is offering. Then the true theoretical odds of the outcome occurring - the outcome is less likely, the outcome is more likely than the odds that we're taking the wager at.
So what's an elementary example of that?
We had a member in our community this week that was really confused about the idea that outcomes don't matter.
When I say outcomes don't matter, what I'm referring to there is if you picked a team to win a spread and the odds of them winning were 50 percent, exactly 50 percent.
And the price that you got was 1.91 or -110. If that was the price you got on that particular wager and you won your bet, you actually made the wrong decision, because if it wins 50 percent of the time, but it only pays 1.91, that's going to lose you money over time.
So some people have a really hard time grasping that even though you won your bet, you made the wrong decision. And the perfect example of that is that the spread should have paid 1.91.
It should pay 2.0 for what's called a fair bet, which is going to break you even over time. And let's call it 2.05, 2.1 or higher, where, theoretically speaking, you're going to make money over time and then it becomes a value wager.
So I used an analogy with this particular member inside of inplayLIVE.
I said, hey, let's play a little game, let's take a dice, one single dice. So it has six standardized six numbers on it. And let's roll the dice. You need to pick which outcome you'd like.
You can pick a one that pays four hundred dollars and you put one hundred dollars in. You can pick a two that pays four hundred dollars. You can pick a three or four that both pay six hundred dollars or you could pick a five or six that pay seven hundred dollars. Which would you pick.
And the odds of a successful outcome are one in six.
So if you roll the one and pick the one, you would have one profit in three hundred dollars back. Yeah but you will lose money over time.
Whereas if you picked a five or six, if I had that theoretical scenario I would bet five and six over and over and over and over and over again.
And I know that if it came 1-4 a whole bunch of times in a row, I still made the right decision, even though the result wasn't correct. And that really is the definition.