We are too blinded by free bets or deposit bonus offered to open an account at new bookies, when we should focus more on the long run and bet with online sportsbooks that takes smallest margin, offer us big limits and therefor are best solution for punter’s profit in the long run.
For easier understanding – just how much money you’re living by margin calculator betting at bookies that take maybe only 1% bigger margin, let’s do a simple calculation.
Example:
NBA bet
average odd: 1.91 (European Odd) or -110 (US odd) represent 4.5% margin
How is this margin calculated ?
Easy.
Let say you bet on a NBA game and you place a wager on a handicap bet.
You have 2 possible outcomes – either team A covers handicap or team B covers handicap.
Both handicap bets have 50% chance to win.
Since odd for 50% chance to win should be 100/50 = @2.0 this means if you bet $100 on both handicap bets, you placed total on both bets $200.
Since 1 bet won, you should get your money back.
$100 wager x @2.0 = $200
But in real life bookies aren’t so generous cause they also want to make profit.
And this is why no bookie will give you @2.0 on both bets with 50% chance to win.
This is why you see usually odd @1.91 on such bets like NBA handicap and total bets on a same game.
And now back to how we calculate bookie’s margin.
We bet $100 on both NBA handicap bets @1.91
So we placed on both bets 2x $100 = $200.
1 bet won and bookie paid out $100 x @1.91 = $191
Total bookie’s profit = $200 – $191 = $9
Total money that bookie accepted = 2x $100 = $200
Bookie’s margin = (total bookie’s profit) / (total money that bookie accepted) = $9 / $200 = 0,045 = 4.5%
More practical formula to calculate bookie’s margin in % is
(2.0 – bookie’s European odd on a bet with 50% chance) x 50
If we want to bet at bookie that has 1% lower margin then we should get odd on a bet with 50% chance to win @1.93
This means that a difference in punter’s profit is 0.02 x punter’s stake – if he bets at bookie that gives him @1.93 (taking 3.5% margin), compared to betting at bookie that gives him @1.91 (taking 4.5% margin).
If we’d bet $100 @1.91 then we’d make $91.
But if we’d place the same bet at online bookie that gives us @1.93 then we’d make $93.
At $100 bet difference in punter’s profit is $2.
Or making this number independent of how much we wager, then this
difference is ($93-$91)/$91 = 2.2%
And this number is crucial to understand how much money punter’s leaving by betting at online bookie with higher margin.
You can easily calculate how much more money you’d get with bookie that has only 1% lower margin.
If you made $10,000 at bookie with 4.5% margin then you’d make 2.2% more or $220 more if you’d place same bets with bookie that takes only 3.5% margin.
And this $220 that you get more by choosing different bookie is not tied to any rollover requirement or condition that you have to have your money on bookie’s account for next 30 days.