Beet the Bookies, what's it about?

Have you ever taken a punt on the footy? Have you ever made much money from it?

Here in Australia it is believed about 38% of people gamble on a weekly basis. See a great breakdown of some the research here

As with most sports way more bet on Australian Rules Football than actually playing it here in Australia.

And whilst I’ve been living here I found ignoring the bookkeepers pretty much impossible

Coming from the UK I was used to having several betting shops on every high street.

You could usually walk past them and avoid the urge to make a bet on who would win this weekend’s game.

Here and now in Australia though, most of my mates have several betting shops in their pocket, by which I mean they have mulitple betting shop apps on their phone (maybe this may well be true back in the UK now too).

It can be hard to walk past push notifications encouraging you to go for it.

While gambling on horse racing is actually more common. That “sport” is just a heinous display of man’s disregard for the welfare of other creatures, so I’ve never got into it.

AFL however is far more engaging, and instead revels in man’s disregard for the welfare of other men.

It is extremely athletic with players regularly running the equivalent of half-marathons during games.

It combines energising periods of seemingly endless battles and scrapes with heart stopping moments of nerve wracking tension.

So I’d be lying to say I hadn’t started to enjoy the game, and eventually put the odd bet or two on.

But even when I’ve been right I’ve ever made much profit. Often the games you have a prediction for the odds just don’t seem worth it.

I think this is because despite being a fairly new sport, it is actually a fairly predictable one.

One factor in this is that the scoring system gives 6 points for a goal and 1 a behind ( just missing or not scoring a clean goal) ensuring ties/draws are extremely rare.

Barring famous examples like the 2010 Grand Final, draws are uncommon.

Another factor might be several teams have had patch where they are terrible for years. To fans of these teams I’m sorry but for most of the 2010’s you could bet against Carlton, St Kilda and Melbourne and the 2 new expansion teams Gold Coast and GWS and be pretty confident they’d lose.

Because the league doesn’t have relegation like the European football leagues, you also know that the team at the bottom will be back next year.

And while they get support in terms of draft picks, it can take years for this to have an impact that helps turn the teams fortunes.

For these reasons and others you can adopt fairly obvious rules of thumb when trying to guess who will win a game and have a fairly good chance of being correct.

Simply looking which teams are playing, where they’re playing and most importantly the odds given to the teams can give you predictions that are right 70-80% of the time.

But the bookmakers know this and even being able to call the results of games correctly 80+% of the time is sometimes not enough to make money on head-to-head bets on AFL games.

They have priced all the likelihoods into their starting odds and then adjust these constantly to ensure there is always a margin for them to take home.

Beet the bookies is an online tool I started working on to help me demonstrate this.

Please know I’m not particularly knowledgeable in maths, statistics or probabilities, so I welcome any feedback around how the results are interpreted.

The ultimate goal to dissuade people from gambling by highlighting in the long term the bookmakers set the odds to ensure the house always wins.

It allows you to set a few details about the game, the teams, the location and the odds. Then you set the amount you would wager and then calculates the return or more likely loss you would stand to make.

Find give it a try here: Beet the bookies