Cricket Value Betting – make your hobby profitable

What is Value Betting?

In short, value betting is when you bet on odds that you do not think accurately reflect the chances of that outcome happening.

The famous coin toss scenario can best explain value betting. If you flip a coin, it can only land on heads or tails. Each side has an exactly 50% chance of happening every time, no matter how many times you flip it.

If Sportsbet.io, for example, was offering odds on a coin toss, it could never make money in the long-term by offering odds of 50/50 - in decimal odds that's 2.00.

Instead, they would offer something like 1.90 on each outcome, therefore, making a small profit in the long-term. That is the bookmaker's margin - 4.8% in this case - and applies to every market they offer. We explain the overround in more detail below.

Now imagine that a bookmaker offered you 2.10 on heads and 1.90 on tails. What would you back?

You should always back heads - the odds offered are higher than the real chance of it happening. Of course, you wouldn't win every time, but in the long-run, you would be guaranteed to make money.

The key to becoming a successful cricket bettor is finding these value bets - prices offered by bookmakers which you think underestimate the chance of the bet happening.

How to apply value betting to cricket

Remember, bookmaker's prices in their purest form are simply opinions. No-one in the world can 100% accurately price up a cricket match - there are just too many variables. This applies for all sports events.

Their opinions may be backed up by stats, data, and years of experience, but they can still be wrong.

Secondly, and importantly, bookies' odds are often influenced by what they think people will bet on. We will explain how this offers you value opportunities later.

So, since the cricket odds you bet on originate from the bookmaker's event probability assessment, they don't necessarily reflect the real probability.

If you can estimate the probabilities of certain events taking place in a cricket game more accurately than the bookmakers can do, then you have got an edge.

Beware of betting on favourites

Why is a team favourite in a match? Because it's more likely to win, yes, but bookmakers know people like betting on favourites.

Therefore, they will make the odds lower than the true odds should be. This helps them avoid big liabilities on the favourite by making the price less attractive.

In our example, India are favourites. The truth is most bettors in India will back them regardless of the odds, and without considering the actual probability of them winning.

The best value bet opportunities typically present themselves on the outsider being too big a price.

Not considering the odds and the implied betting probabilities is a poor betting strategy - even if you agree the favourite will win.

Your bets should always be based on your assessment of the odds, meaning there will be many times you are not betting on who you think will win, but the team you think are over-priced to win.

This is one of the hardest things for new bettors to get their head around, but it’s crucial to be able to separate the heart from the head.

We suggest that you initially target secondary odds markets like Over Runs or Total Runs instead of a high volume cricket markets like the Match Winner.

The secondary markets are trickier for a bookmaker to price compared to a highly liquid market. On big betting sites, where most of the betting volume is staked on the match winner market, the collective opinion (wisdom of the crowd) means the odds are adjusted efficiently, taking any value out of the market.