Value bets

How does it work ? Lets assume there was a 20% drop for a game at Pinnacle’s in a short time interval. It means that somebody knows something and put big money on it. Actually you don’t need to know the reason, if it’s a flue in the team, key-player injury, or maybe match is fixed. You don’t need to know the team or league or even the sport. You should find a bookie with good odds and bet on it (knowing this is a good deal, because odds are overestimated and will be corrected soon). This is value bet.

Within few minutes all soft bookies will correct their odds, following Pinnacle. But you are faster, because you have dombetting, that gives you instant notifications, right after the drop, way faster than soft bookies corrections. You usually have several minutes to do it, it’s a plenty of time but you need to hurry up.  If you don’t make it on time, it’s okay, forget about it and wait for another alert from dombetting.

Selecting bets

The real measure of the value bet is the difference between Pinnacle closing odds VS odds you bet on.

Example: if you bet for Home team win with @2.2 odds, and the Pinnacle’s closing line is @1.6, you have made an excellent deal, no matter the result. Playing like this you will get a long-term profit.

Dombetting (especially during the weekends when a lot of games are scheduled) will provide you many odd-drops alerts, but not every odd drop is worth betting. My private criteria are pretty restrictive. I prefer to play small amount of bets with better chances of success. What matters to me  the most is:

• when the match starts – the perfect situation is to catch a drop when the match is just about to start. In this case you have a great chance that odds trend will not change into opposite direction and you won’t be on the “wrong side”.
  So monitor the odds until match starts and take actions if trend reverses. Compare your bet with current and eventually with closing lines from Pinnacle. If there is no value, back away (cash out) by betting on opposite outcome. Even if it costs you some loss.
• the drop value – it needs to be at least 16% to consider betting (but this is my subjective minimum drop limit). The bigger, the better (less risky)
• odds range – I almost never bet with odd lower than 1.5 and bigger than 2.5
• I prefer flat stake on every bet, let’s say 50$. I got good results being consistent and betting the same amount of money on every bet.
• double check if the drop is not a Pinnacle’s editor error (sometimes editor simply makes a mistake, in example by mixing a lines, and publishes wrong odds). This is especially the case for very big drops ( bigger than 30%)

But I encourage you to develop you own selection method. If you have lot of time, your criteria should be less restrictive. On the other hand, if you know your bookie can limit you fast, it’s better to take less bets but with better chance of success. You can also try to find an early drop – if you succeed value is usually much bigger. You can have separate strategies per leagues or even per team. For example I observed once that 1 specific team has lot of drops for under/over 1st-half market (probably games ware fixed but for 1st half only, 2nd half was fair)

Developing you strategy

This is really important to keep records of your bets and analyze. This is the only way to improve your results. Draws conclusions, eliminate mistakes, do not bet on certain leagues or markets if you see any rule. But remember to have decent sample of bets before you notice something. If you lost 3 times in a row by betting on certain market, it does not mean you should exclude this market. if you see a rule and it keeps repeating on, let’s say, 100-200 bets, this is a decent sample to adjust your strategy to this rule.
I do not recommend playing big flat stake at the beginning though. Start with a low flat stake, keep your betting records, analyze and raise your stake after you gain a stable yield. Or even better – because of possible limits, do not bet at all, just write down your bets in excel, until you have good, repeatable profit – then you are ready to take real bets.
The criteria above are the result of such analysis. It took me 3 months and around 1000 virtual bets before I finally started to earn money on regular basis.

You need to remember that this is a long-term strategy and You should not expect win on every bet. However you should be able to catch easily 10 drops each weekend and if you select your bets carefully it will bring you a decent ROI.

Soft bookies

You don’t really need to have multiple accounts. If you observe the market you will notice that there are always the same bookmakers that are slow with catching up the current odds trend. Examples:

• bet365
• 1xBit

For beginners it’s enough to have only one soft bookie account. If you are on a winning path, open more accounts to increase your chances of finding the value

Surebets

Surebets (sports arbitrage betting) occur when different bookmakers have different odds for the same game. It creates an oportunity for you to win without any risk, your bet is secured no matter the outcome.  Dombetting is a great tool for sure betting.  

How to use Domebtting for surebets?

Each time a big drop is alerted by dombetting there is great chance that it created a surebet opportunity on the market. All you have to do now is to go to any odds portal (like oddsportal.com), find a match and check the odds offered by soft bookes. You will easily find overestimated odds. Then you can use ‘Surebet calculator’ to estimate the stakes and you are ready to play a surebet.

This may sound complicated, but after practice you will be fast enough to be efficient in surebets.

Go to Examples section to check few examples of surebets created after odds movements alerted by dombetting.

Of course there are more advanced tools that support surebetting, but look at the pricing – it costs fortune ! 

Few hints:

• when placing a surebet you should always bet on soft bookie odds first, as there is less time for it (before odds are corrected by bookie). Then you bet opposite outcome at Pinnacle’s 
•  for odds comparison You can use any odds portal but my recommendation is oddsportal.com. After free registration You have access to see all odds published by many bookmakers
• it’s also a good idea to be logged in to your bet account to save time

Examples

Example #1 (value, surebet)

This is an example of basketball match (France » Pro B : Evreux – Chalons-Reims). As you can see Pinnacle dropped the odd for home team when the match was just about to start (because somebody put big money on Evreux win). The rest of bookmakers haven’t managed to drop the odd giving you an excellent opportunity to bet a nice Value-bet (2.46)

Odds movements have also created an excellent surebet (value 5,59%)

Example #2 (valuebet, surebet)

Next example of soccer match where Pinnacle dropped the odd for home team when the match was just about to start. Some of the bookmakers haven’t managed to drop the odd giving you an excellent opportunity to bet a nice Value-bet

Odds movements have also created a nice surebet (value 3,89%)

Example #3 (valuebet, surebet)

Another example, this time tennis match. As you can see Pinnacle ‘s closing odd was 1.4 when Betaway was offering 1.75 odd. Nice value bet, isn’t it?

Odds movements have also created an excellent surebet (value 13%)

Example #4 (valuebet, surebet)

How much do you know about snooker ? Not much ? But if Pinnacle drops the odd from 1.8 to 1.2, and at the same time other book still offers 1.8 odd , do you still feel that your lack of knowledge is important?

Odds movements have also created an enormous surebet (value 32%)

Example #5 (valuebet , surebet)

Brasilian Voleyball and another big odd drop on “-2,5 Sets Asian Handicap” market.

Odds movements have also created a nice surebet (value 6,5%)

Example #6 (valuebet, surebet)

Friendly match during winter break and great drop on Over/Under market. Notice what was happening with the odd value 20 minutes before match started…

Odds movements have also created an excellent surebet (value 11,11%)

Example #7 (valuebet, surebet)

This example shows that sometimes you can catch a pure pearl.
Basketball match (Brazil NBB > Pinheiros – Limeira, 14 Nov 2013, 20:00). Dombetting is alerting a big odds movements. I am able to bet on Limeira @2.95 while at the same time Pinnacle offer is @1.92
The final closing odds were @6.17 for home team , and @1.16 for away team. Final result 53:91 (11:20, 15:23, 12:17, 15:31) so the match was probably fixed.

Would you bet on Limera for @2.95 when a real risk value is 1.16 ? 🙂