Typical offered wager at Unibet for a round match up is
Harman +120
Henley -110
Tie +800
(if you wager only a golfer you will win only if he wins; otherwise loss on tie and straight loss)
OR
Harman +104
Henley -132
And in the event of a tie no bet.
Which do you select and why?
My rough calculations are if my analysis projects selected golfer at 5% greater implied probability than offered then better wager is #1 (tie is a loss).
Anyone care to weigh in? Thank you.
What do you mean by “if my analysis projects selected golfer at 5% greater implied probability than offered”?
There are two implied probabilities for a given golfer (from the two bets offered by the books).
You might find these two Model Talk posts interesting:
Much appreciated Matt! Overlooked these in my site search.
I will study the materials you link and if I have some dialogue that might be fruitful I will circle back.
The matchup tool offers both ties as loss and tie as void, so whichever one shows the bigger edge.
Take a look at this Google Sheet, with my analysis of impact on increasing win expectation of my selected golfer by five percentage points in both the tie is push and tie is loss scenario.
Wondering if this analysis is reasonable, and what it indicates for optimal choice in wagering match ups (tie protection or no tie protection).
Hoping the embedded google sheets lands here.
Why not just compare the odds offered by the book to the odds that DG provides?
He’s trying to get at a more general rule of whether it’s better to bet with or without ties offered.
I appreciate the exercise. I think adding the 5% (and subtracting 2.5% from the other player’s win and the tie probability) might be a bit misleading… you would expect the tie to decrease by less, right? Maybe something closer to 4% and 1%. I’m also unsure what the purpose of doing this is.
I agree with what’s in your 2nd column from the right: betting randomly on the no-ties matchup will result in less money lost ($6 vs $9). The intuition is: unless the ties-lose odds are better (from a juice standpoint), you won’t offset the benefit of getting your money back on a tie.
This also means that on 72-hole matchups (where ties are less frequent) the EV from these two bet types (assuming relatively similar odds to what you’ve shown) will be closer. Related to that, I wouldn’t assume 11.1% for the tie probability (as that would assume the book put zero juice on the tie), it should be lower. Won’t change the overall conclusion, but will bring the EV values closer together.
edit: for example, assuming a tie probability of 10% (which would be implied by the book’s odds if they applied juice proportionally to each price), the EV of the ties-lose would be -$8.3 and for ties-void it would be -$6.7.
Matt. Grateful for your insights! I’ll study and keep working through my analysis.
Somewhat related …. What is your sense on how much of an edge is reasonable for a successful bettor to achieve? For example, if a wager is offered for Golfer A at -132 (implied probability 56.9%), what might a successful bettor project for probability when deciding to wager on Golfer A
Madtadder. Thanks for weighing in!
Matt’s reply is correct regarding my general objective.
More specifically, when using my projected probability for a given wager I want to determine whether to wager with or without imbedded tie protection.
I will go back and re-examine the DG match up tool in any case. My recollection is it doesn’t directly provide an answer for my process. (Going to look to see if DG tool has match up numbers indicating positive EV for book offered wagers).
Thanks again.
To Madtadder’s point, if you have your own probabilities, and you are just trying to determine which bets to take, you can just compare them to the odds provided for ties-lose and ties-void bets and take whichever one has the higher EV.
I will work with that tool. Thanks for helping me along the learning curve.