Value Betting: Pros and Cons

Value betting has long been used by bettors from all over the world to make money on sports betting. In today's article, we will talk about all the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy.

What are value bets?

Sometimes bookmakers make mistakes when setting their odds for a particular outcome. In other words, the bookmaker underestimates the result of an event.

It can be several reasons for this:

• bookmaker deliberately overestimates the odds for a certain outcome due to serious competition, hoping to attract new customers;
• analysts from bookmaker’s team make mistakes when forming a betting line;
• bookie reacts slowly to changes in situation of the match;

As you already understand, the aim of working with the above-mentioned strategy is precisely to work with overestimated odds, thanks to which we gain an advantage over the bookmaker.

Some bettors also call value betting “ev” or “expected value betting”. Find out what is EV in sports betting and how it differs from value betting in another article.

How to find overestimated odds?

In order to work with overestimated odds, you need first to find them. You can do this either on your own or with the help of specialized scanners.

Manual search

If we talk about the manual search for overestimated odds, then the bettor’s work includes a couple of stages:

First, he needs to calculate the percentage of margin that the bookmaker has put into opposite outcomes, using the formula 100/O1 + 100/O2. Hereinafter, O1 and O2 are the odds for the opposing results from the betting lines.

Next, he needs to calculate real probability of the selected outcomes. This calculation is made using the formula O1+MP, O2+MP.

In this case, MP is the margin (its percentage), which we’ve determined in the previous step.

Next, the obtained odds are taken and compared with those of other (TOP) bookmakers. If the odds are higher than these values, it means that the bookmaker has underestimated the probability of the outcome and you can bet.

Value bets search services

The search for overestimated odds on your own can be time-consuming, which is why many bettors prefer to use value bet scanners.

As of today, the leader among such services is BetBurger. The functionality of this value betting software allows you to almost instantly get a list of available inflated odds for the selected bookmakers in Prematch and Live events.

That being said, the selection of overestimated odds will always be great as BetBurger analyzes lines from over 150 bookmakers across 43 sports and 200+ sports markets. Moreover, the bettor has convenient multifilters at his disposal, with which you can set up the value bets list according to the required parameters.

Pros and cons of the strategy

Finally, we’ll tell you about the key advantages and disadvantages of value betting in comparison with another effective betting system called "surebet"

Advantages

• The bettors who place value bets are much more difficult to identify than arbers, and therefore they are less likely to fall under the restrictions by bookmakers;
• Value bets can bring tangible profits to players;
• Unlike surebets, value bets require only one outcome, with no opposite bet.

Disadvantages

Working with surebets, the bettor gets a profit regardless of the outcome of a sporting event, unlike value bets, where he can lose. However, this betting system is very effective at a long distance.

In addition, we would like to note that nowadays value betting strategy is actively used by bettors both independently and to improve the efficiency of some financial systems (eg. flat).