The element of chance in sports betting

Sports betting is inherently a very unpredictable business, so how can bettors control chance?

Joseph Buchdal looks at the best way to deal with the issue of the inevitable randomness of sports betting.

Why does placing sports betting involve chance?

In The Illusion of Control, we explored the risks and dangers associated with misinterpreting meaningless dependencies between different data, the relationship between which was in fact completely random, uncontrollable, and unpredictable.

Similar to weather forecasting and stock market gambling, sports betting is inherently unpredictable.

In sports betting, the belief that outcomes can be accurately predicted with information and knowledge about a team or player can lead to an exaggerated sense of trust in one’s predictive ability. It was mentioned in the article in question that lack of information can be a very dangerous factor. Also, you must choose only trusted casinos to save your investments.
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Furthermore, our tendency to attribute successes to ourselves leads us to intend to associate successful predictions with internal qualities (the idea that an experienced player is an expert at making predictions, with a skill that always results in correct betting) and at the same time to attribute failures to external circumstances (the idea that bets are lost solely because of player bad luck).

Despite the lack of control, the reality is that, like weather forecasting and stock market gambling, sports betting is inherently unpredictable. The development of a game or match is complex, chaotic, and probably even non-deterministic (assuming we refuse to accept the probability that events during a competition are purely random).

Most bettors agree that the probability of winning for each individual bet can be significantly affected by luck or bad luck. But how much influence does randomness have on the success of punters over long periods?

How random is the process of placing sports bets?

So as not to be totally fooled by randomness, it is useful to carry out an analysis of how much inherent random variability there really is in the outcome of a sporting event.

One way of looking at this relationship is to plot a time series of hypothetical betting returns with “pure” odds to see how much they vary over different time periods. Betting odds are just an estimate of the probability of our expectations.

According to the principle of collective opinion, on average, these coefficients are a very reliable indicator of “real” probabilities. However, due to chance, results often deviate from idealized market expectations.

“Net” betting odds are based on real market average betting odds for the match, excluding bookmaker margins.

For example, the presence of lucky outsider winners will raise this mark well above zero, while an excessive number of favorite-winners, whose offered betting profits are proportionately smaller (for the same betting size), will drop it below zero.

However, it is worth noting that the value of these deviations sometimes turns out to be so significant that the expected profitability starts exceeding 50%. If a player managed to show a profitability of over 50% after 30 bets, it is very likely that the player will be tempted to attribute the achievement to his skill or unbelievable good luck.

On the other hand, if the result is a loss of 30%, the player’s confidence in the possibility of eventually returning the total profitability to the mean value of 0% is naturally decreasing.

So what can we learn from this information?

The number of bets in this study far exceeds the number that most bettors would place during several football seasons, but nevertheless, these bets still show significant deviations in profitability for a few percent of cases over a long period of time.

The most prominent bettors are far more effective at predicting the outcomes of sporting events, but even they recognize the influence of chance on the final outcome.

And even with that said, no gambler would place bets on all of the home team’s win, away team, and draw options for every football game. Regardless, the return values for a set of your own bets placed over a long period of time will surely vary in a similar manner to any complex system, the results of which are almost impossible to predict with certainty.
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The basic idea to take away from this is this: whether you can get a 20% return on 300 bets or whether your efforts will result in a 4% return on 3000 bets, in either case, there is no way to prove that the outcome even remotely depended on your skill. Unless you know the level of randomness in sporting events at each interval, the tendency to attribute successes to yourself is likely to mislead you.