Opening Odds, Falling Odds

Back when i was doing my internship, many years ago, the husband of a colleague of mine used to be into sports betting and would make a decent sum every month with this theory of his. Basically, he tracks the odds of a match from the time they're released till just before they close (in-game bets not included).

His theory was that you want to bet on the team with falling odds. With one caveat, if the odds drop too much, that indicates a 'heavy boat' and is a match that's likely to be fixed.

Let's put some filters

I've got no idea how he filtered which matches to bet on but for our purposes, let's set the following rules:

• Team must be favorite (lowest odds)
• Team should have falling odds from $2+
• Odds must still be greater than 2
• Team must have overall winning H2H or Winning Manager H2H

Today's sample

Match	Prediction	Odds	Outcome
Al Riffa vs Al Shabbab	Al Riffa	2	L
Real Oviedo Vs Valladolid	Real Oviedo	2.04	L
Union Espanola vs Huachipato	Union	2.1	W
Ebbsfleet vs Sutton United	Ebbsfleet	2.2	L
SJK vs Honka	SJK	2.39	W
Boulogne vs Pau	Boulogne	2.2	L
Kyoto vs Kumamoto	Kyoto	2.04	L
Tokyo Verdy vs Mito Hollyhock	Tokyo	2.1	W
Queen of the South vs Dundee	Dundee	2.2	W
St. Mirren vs Greenock	St. Mirren	2.04	W

Review

So overall, we got 5/10 correct, which is better than E(X) of 3 or 4 out of 10. Given that we're looking at odds over $2, getting a 50% win ratio is needed to break even / make a small profit.

This round's return was 5.4% which is not worth the risk in my opinion. For the next round of 10, i'm going to modify the filter by using a form filter instead of historical / manager H2Hs.