The difference between profiting and not profiting when gambling on sports is as close as a good shave; a 52.4% shave to be precise. The average sportsbook charges a 4.75% margin, so, you must win at least 52.4% of even bets or pay the bookie their cut.
In your mind you are probably thinking “that’s not so hard”, but winning 52.4% of a series of spread beats has befuddled millions of hopeful bettors who insist they can predict random outcomes just a bit better than the market.
Having tracked thousands of betting records at fansunite.com, we know that beating the best bookmaker, Pinnacle, over thousands of bets is overly ambitious for all but the very best.
Bettors who have stayed in the game long enough understand “the grind” — the constant stream of bets where the bettors edge shaves a cent or two of expected profit from every contest. Over 1000 bets, the average bettor should expect to experience a lot of variance and with wildly different outcomes based on luck. However, given an ensemble of 52.5% spread bettors, the average profit of the bettors will converge to a fixed number.
Our goal is to compare FansUnite’s historic 1% margin against other margins that can be routinely found in the industry. To compare the margins we pick the most standard experiment:
- All bettors are 52.4% winners on 2.0/2.0 even bets;
- All units are $10 from a $1000 bankroll; and
- All bettors bet 1000 bets.
We constructed the following animation to demonstrate the value of a low margin:
Even the closest sporsbook, MarathonBet, falls short of the 1% margin’s value to bettors by 50%. It should be clear from this analysis that betting anywhere but a low margin book is akin to burning money. While this is not evident from bet to bet, over 1000 bets, the constant shaving of your value results in much lower return for months of hard grinding.
FansUnite.io was founded on the principal of reducing the bookmakers footprint on financial transactions as much as possible. Our Protocol for sports betting will allow many new sportsbooks to charge their own margins and promote a vibrant community of developers.
FansUnite.bet will be committed to pushing the envelope of sports-betting modeling technology and offering the lowest margin to maximize the chance for the casual bettor to win.
Stephen Rothwell
FansUnite Head Trader and Machine Learning Specialist
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