Arbitrage betting
Before you start performing arbitrage betting, make sure you have read and fully understand the arbitrage betting guide. The guide is only 3 pages long, but it is worth printing out so you can easily refer to it when necessary. Arbitrage betting involves placing large bets online – so it can be dangerous if you don’t fully understand what you are doing.
The large number of bookmakers that are currently available in both markets, the online and the land based market, made possible the rise of a new type of betting: arbitrage betting. Considered by many bettors as a profitable sports betting system, the arbitrage betting gets more and more fans each day.
The whole idea behind the arbitrage betting is that the bookmakers have different odds for the same sport event, so if you take a good look at the odds you can find a profitable combination of bets. The best part is that if you made the right choice you cannot lose, the profits being 100% sure.
First of all you need to pick a sport event and check out the odds at as many bookmakers as you can. Let’s take for example a football game between Team A and Team B. Check out all odds for the three possible outcomes: Team A to win, tie and Team B to win. Choose the best odds for each outcome, but be sure to choose three different bookmakers. You place your bets and then wait to see which one is successful.
As it is on Wall Street, sports arbitrage betting is risk-free only in theory. Discrepancies between bookies have a tendency to disappear quickly before an arbitrage bettor has time to complete their bets. In online sports markets they last for an average of fifteen minutes, while with traditional bookmakers, they usually last several hours. Also, if one bookmaker cancels a bet, what used to be arbitrage becomes a standard wager, with all its implied risks. The most common risk in sports arbitrage betting, however, is simple human error. This can be reduced by using one of the many arbitrage calculators that have cropped up on the internet, by employing someone else to place the bets, allowing you to stay at the computer, gauging the numbers and by a solid understanding of how sports arbitrage betting works.