On Bovada they allow you to bet on all sorts of random soccer leagues like Tanzania, Gambia and Mauritania.
I noticed that the sum of the implied probabilities for the moneyline odds for each game usually comes out to 111%, while those for established leagues like England and Germany comes out to 105%. I'm guessing Bovada does this because the information for these more obscure leagues is less reliable and they are less confident in the lines they make.
Anybody ever make money betting on these obscure leagues?
I agree with rickroll, it would be pretty cool to read what people are working on these days outside of EPL and Bundesliga. About a year ago I listened to one of the Marco Blume interviews (Trading Director at Pinnacle) where I think he mentioned that the best of the best EPL bettors can expect around a 2% ROI. Take a shot at the obscure leagues and let us know how it goes.
I’m really curious how Bovada makes lines in these games. Do they have someone who specializes in obscure African leagues, or maybe use a data dependent formula using goal differentials/home advantage/etc.
I would presume the sports book charge more juice on obscure leagues for pretty much all the obvious reasons you can think of (basically, people having better info. and not a very deep betting pool... plus, the costs of offering obscure soccer is not spread amongst as big a $$$ pool)
how much can you get down on soccer in Tanzania?... I have no idea. is it ridiculously low? or surprisingly high?......
basic power ratings (with perhaps some qualitative adjustment i.e. the Messi of Tanzania isn't playing for his team tonight) with some experience with the model can get you a reasonable betting number.. then opening the betting to smaller limits and people acting on it can get you to a good number...... the big thing with power ratings and something like NFL football is usually the spread is multiple <1.00 of the power ratings difference if very good or very bad teams are playing (I assume neutral field). so you need experience massaging the power rating number but that's probably very obvious very quickly if you start handicapping lines
masseyratings.com and 538/Nate Silver do power ratings and predict game scores for a lot of leagues. Massey especially..
I can't remember if Massey's game predictions are based on his power ratings or based on the game result and over-under odds.... for example, NFL spread of 7 points and over/under 50 would mean 28.5-21.5 expected score. soccer it's a bit more complex as the scores are very discrete. NFL is closer to continuous scores
Is it possible that betting off massey ratings alone can be profitable? I was comparing massey win probabilities of some La Liga games against the odds on Bovada and a few times ran into situations where there were some fairly big discrepancies (i.e. Massey gave team X a 55% win probability, break-even point for team X based on Bovada odds was 47%).
Seems like it would be too easy to be true, but who knows?
