Calculation Tool for Determining Spaces or Borders
🤖 All-purpose Betting Assistant 🤖Brian Webb & Alex Windsor 📅 July 31, 2024
Ready to take control of your betting game? Our handy tool helps you uncover the profit that bookies sneakily tuck into their odds—their margin!
📊 Margin & Payout Calculator
Want to know the real juice bookies are squeezing from your bets? Hopping on our margin calculator is the answer! To get the ball rolling:
- Choose your odds style you're given (American, decimal, or fractional)
- Decide whether your bet is two-way (like over/under) or three-way (1X2)
- List the odds for all options
Our clever tool will promptly display the margin your bookie's banking, the implied probability, and the fair odds for every wager.
For example, if the bookie's offering 2.0 for over 2.5 goals and 1.8 for under, you'd select decimal odds for a two-way market and input 2.0 and 1.8 into the boxes.
With this info, you'll find the bookie's commission is 5.56%, and the over bet has a 50% implied probability. Meanwhile, the under bet clocks in at 55.6%—busting the odds!
🤖 Manual Margin Math
Crunching the numbers by hand is just as easy. Keep these four steps top of mind:
- Gather all potential outcomes' decimal odds
- Divide 1 by the decimal odds and multiply by 100
- Sum all the numbers, then subtract by 100
- Tada! You've got yourself the margin as a percentage!
Here's a clearer example: If Man City is offering 1.8 to beat Arsenal, Arsenal 3.5, and a draw at 5.0, to compute the margin, follow these steps:
- 1/1.8 = 55.55 (Man City), 1/ 3.5 = 28.57 (Arsenal), 1/ 5.0 = 20 (Draw)
- 55.55 + 28.57 + 20 = 104.12
- 104.12 - 100 = 4.12
- The margin is 4.12%
💼 Bookmaker's Margin & The Hidden Profit
Have you ever wondered about the chunky profits bookies seem to reel in? That's their margin—the profit line you unintentionally cross each time you place a bet. A margin is the difference between the expected chances (true odds) and the offered odds, benefiting the bookmaker when their bets are balanced.
In a balanced betting scenario, if a bookie garners £1,200 worth of action on an underdog paying 3.0, and £2,500 on the favorite paying 1.5, the bookie makes a profit no matter the outcome—£100 from the underdog loss or £200 from the favorite win.
Even before the games start, the bookie's already banked their profit! Low margins work in your favor, bringing you closer to receiving the true odds and, over the long run, potentially breaking even as a punter.
📊 Implied Probability
Implied probability indicates the likelihood of an event happening based on the bookie's given odds. Simply summing up all event's implied probabilities will result in a total that surpasses 100%, due to the hidden profit (margin built into the odds).
Take a minute to calculate your bet's implied probability before placing it. This insightful data can help guide your betting decisions, like betting on Man Utd (3.5 odds) if you think they've got a better chance (38%) than what the bookie suggests (28.6%).
🚫 Avoid High Margin Markets
Most punters lose money by participating in high margin markets with margins greater than 10%. The higher the margin, the harder it is to turn a consistent profit, given the challenge of overcoming a 5% margin (winning 55% of your bets) or a 10% margin (winning 60%).
Even savvy sports betters struggle to win 60% of their bets. That's why professionals typically stick to low-margin markets (less than 3%) like 1X2 and handicap bets, where their bet win rate only needs to surpass 50% to generate a profit.
Alex Windsor 🏌️♂️🏈🏋️♂️Alex, a versatile sports betting and betting tools expert, has been on board in the iGaming industry for ten years. Currently, he works as our Managing Editor, ensuring accuracy in our betting content, providing brilliant sports betting insights, and reviewing diverse bookmakers. Alex, who's deeply passionate about football and soccer, provides essential resources on betting tools to help bettors navigate odds, accumulators, and betting strategies.
"With a deep understanding of sports-betting and personal-finance, Alex Windsor, a ten-year veteran in the iGaming industry, utilizes his expertise as Managing Editor to provide valuable insights on betting tools and strategies. This includes understanding betting margins, which can significantly affect your profits in sports-betting, as well as the hidden profit built into the odds provided by bookmakers."
"By adopting effective betting strategies and focusing on low-margin markets, such as 1X2 and handicap bets, punters can increase their chances of turning a consistent profit in sports-betting, rather than participating in high-margin markets with margins greater than 10%."
