Once you have become a seasoned sports better, betting odds will become second nature to you.  But for the beginners out there who want to venture into the exciting betting available to New Zealand punters, a few explanations on how betting odds work should help you figure out how to place bets wisely and put yourself in line for big wins.

Betting Odds in Sports Betting NZ

Betting odds tell you quite a few things at a glance. The main things they show you is what your likelihood is of winning a bet on a particular game or player, and also how much money you stand to win if your prediction is accurate. These are presented by the big sportsbooks or bookmakers by a fraction – for example 4/1 or 1/91, also known as fractional odds.  The actual calculation used (let’s use 4/1) is this example: Probability (%) = 1/(4+1) =  0.20. Therefore the odds of you wining are 20%.

But What Will I Win?

To calculate your winnings is very straightforward. Besides your winnings from the odds value, your stake (initial bet) is also returned to you.  These examples should give you a very good idea about what winnings the betting odds will get for you.

• 1/1for each NZ$1 that you bet, your winnings will be NZ$1
• 1/4for each NZ$4 that you bet, your winnings will be NZ$1
• 4/1for each NZ$1 that you bet, your winnings will be NZ$4

Betting Odds In All Sports

There will be different betting odds for every single one of the sports games and matches which you are viewing on the online sportsbooks or online betting apps. And even within each game, different betting markets will have different betting odds.

Just looking at any given A-League match on any big sportsbooks and some of the betting markets will include correct scores, to win to nil, scorecast, betting on players, margin, handicap and head-to-head bets. Each of these will definitely have a huge range of varied betting odds set by the bookmakers, and of course these odds can fluctuate if the public have favourites which they are betting heavily for. Sometimes it can pay off big time to bet against the odds.

While they may seem more risky, often punters bet with blind loyalty for their favourite teams, and this can skew the early on betting odds that the bookmakers had set, and work in your favour.

How Do The Bookmakers Generate Betting Odds?

In some sports such as the NFL fairly simple algorithms which are based on margins of wins and also the points that were scored are put into use. Research done by Hal Stern in 1991 indicated that the betting odds’ probability regarding a final margin win for any NFL home team could be well approximated with a normal random variable with a mean which looks like this: (Home edge + the home team rating) – (away teams rating) using a standard deviation % of 13.86.

With football, it may be possible that the sportsbooks are able to create programs that look regressively into football player stats which result in them having the capability to create odds knowing exactly which players will make up the team in future games, not just looking at narrow indicators such a victories by the entire (somewhat different each time) team.