Arbitrage Betting (Sure Bets) – Guaranteed Way To Win

About betting you may hear many things such as if it is a lottery, an investment and many other opinions, but you should know there is a guaranteed way to win and it is arbitrage betting.

Arbitrage betting is also known as sure bets because…well, you do not need an explanation here.

You get it right – betting does not have be a gambling because it can be an investment with easily calculated returns.

So what is the arbitrage betting? To put it in a simple way, it is a difference between odds that lets you to always win. You buy every possible outcome (f.e., put wagers on both X and Y teams).

Therefore you are sure that thanks to the odds at that time you will always make more money than you spent on covering all possible outcomes.

For example, if you have 100 EUR budget and the match may only have two endings, you split sum not equally to 50 EUR, but accordingly to odds (do not worry, we will get to the formula soon enough).

It is important to know that arbitrage is not always possible. Very often there are no sure bets. Very often you will have to compare odds at different bookies and place your bets likewise.

Arbitrage formula:

Arbitrage size = 1 / X odds + 1 / Y odds

(where X and Y are possible outcomes of the match).

An example:

Tennis. Damir Dzhumhur versus Richard Gasquet (Bethard and Marathonbet bookie odds here).

1 / 3.75 + 1 / 1.36 = 0.266 + 0.735 = ~1.

1 you can consider as 100 percent (simply multiple the number you got by 100).

If the number 100 or higher, we can say there is no arbitrage. In order to have an arbitrage we need a number smaller than 100 (smaller the number is, better). Therefore this our example has no sure bet.

If there was a sure bet, we could count return on investment using this formula:

Expected return = budget (that you use for X + Y) / arbitrage size.

Since in the example we got 1, this means that further calculations would look like this:

Expected return = 100 EUR / 1 = 100 EUR. Therefore we could split our 100 to two wagers that would give us 100 EUR back in return (no profit, no loss).

To know how much you should place on possible outcomes (for two outcome games) you should use these formulas:

Wager on X = expected return / odds X wins;

Wager on Y = expected return / odds Y wins.

Although these calculations are pretty simple and basic, it would be much easier for you to rely on online calculators. Formulas are ready there so all you have to is just to write your numbers.

If you want to make your job even easier, there are more than online calculators. You may use some of various services that pick arbitrage bets for you. Usually this kind of services are costly, so you have to decide whether your budget is big enough to cover both betting and service costs.

In the next part of the article we are going to talk about risks and requirements that you will face while trying to successfully make sure bets.