Beat the Bookmakers at their own game

Don’t compete with the Bookmakers

Clients of the online sports betting industry dream of “beating the bookmakers” and, most often, find in the adrenaline and excitement of their risky gambling activities, an escape from the boredom of everyday life.  To maximize profit, bookmakers employ teams of data scientists to analyze decades of sports data and develop highly accurate models for predicting the outcome of sports events.  Although several strategies have been proposed to compete with bookmakers’ models, from expert predictions, probability models based on Power scores, Elo ratings, Maher-Poisson approaches, prediction markets, arbitrage strategies, and odds bias exploitation, to our knowledge there is no precedent in the scientific literature that they consistently outperform the house and show sustained profit over years and across sports leagues around the world. 

It is unlikely that you can create a prediction model that can beat the professionals.

Can a betting strategy outperform the sports betting market?

Although bookmakers’ profitable business (along with their modelling advantage and control of odds pricing) seems to suggest the opposite, we demonstrate that bookmakers can be beaten with their own numbers. We developed a betting strategy for the sports betting markets that exploits the implicit information contained in the bookmakers’ aggregate odds to systematically take advantage of mispriced events.

Our betting system differs from previous betting strategies in that, instead of trying to build a model to compete with bookmakers’ forecasting expertise, we use their publicly available odds as a proxy of the true probability of a game outcome.

With these proxies we search for mispricing opportunities, i.e., games with odds offered above the estimated fair value.  Our method returns sustained profits by only investing in opportunities with a positive return on investment (ROI) and we base the size of our bets to the size of the calculated edge.  Our method suggests that the sports betting market is inefficient. 

Bookmakers can be beaten consistently over multiple sports and leagues with a single strategy, the

Mapa Method +