What prevents someone from betting $1 on every NFL team to win the super bowl, at the beginning of the season where the odds are all pretty good?
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There is nothing preventing you from doing that except for the fact that sportsbooks make it financial unsound to do so. To make $1 winning the bet, you would have to pick a team who’s odds are +3200. Even the last place team right now only has +2500 odds, which means your $1 bet on all teams would lose $7 even if that longshot actually wins. Over half the teams only pay +500 odds($5 on a $1 bet). The best team(Bucs right now) only pays 9/4 (2.25 times your $1)
Casinos have already anticipated this strategy many years ago and have adjusted their odds accordingly to make sure you will lose money.
Sadly this is not the genius idea you think it is.
The same thing is true of craps and roulette. If you bet every possible bet, you will lose money.
For those interested in gambling, google “wizard of odds”
The site does appear to be basically an advertisement blog for online casinos but the guy really breaks down the odds and a couple strategies that people swear by.
Honestly after reading the site over and over, it changed my understanding when it comes to gambling/odds, house edge and strategies I had built.
I spent years building roulette strats and just scrapped them after coming across the site.
You absolutely can but you would lose money. It’s called an overround. The the implied probability of all outcomes (every team winning) should add up to 100%. However, bookies use overround (or vig) to make this probability greater than 100% – which then becomes their profit / margin.
Why not calculate your expected winnings using this technique at the start of next season?
Hunt: you won’t make any money.
The situation you are describing is called arbitrage, which is riskless betting where you make money regardless of the outcomes.
In finance arbitrage opportunities are rare and companies spend considerable resources trying to identify where these opportunities exist and exploiting them to their own gain.
For sports those sorts of team wide bets are valued as a whole, so the company set it such that this sort of event can’t take place. If by some fluke it did happen, people would jump on it and very quickly the bet would be adjusted to remove the risk.
Some people do spread betting, where they take the initial offer of a £10 freebet (which can’t be cashed out) and them using a calculator to bet on a combination of bets to try and improve upon or minimise the loss of the free bet and turn it into winnings that can be withdrawn.
It’s called the rake.
If you add up all the odds it should come to one.
The odds of a team winning is 1 in 1. Somebody has to win
Theoretically each team starts with odds of 32/1.
Obviously certain teams may be more favoured, based on history etc.
But if you actually added up all the odds, it would come to 0.97 or so.
So 3 cents of every dollar bet goes to the bookie.
Nothing but what is the point, your at a 100% net loss regardless who wins. Kinda a silly question
Read about expected value and look at what the payouts are compared to what you put in compared to the odds of any one team winning. It’s a money losing bet I guarantee it.
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