bwin Sportsblog - Football - A follow on

Yesterday I spoke about my own individual view of sports betting and how I used data to place bets. I will expand on that a little more today by looking at my lay of England in this years World Cup. Basically I form my strategy around what I call the "Even Money Concept". Actually this isn't a known concept but just something that I invented some time ago to hopefully make a little money in betting on sports. I use the idea of assessing events around break even. Looking at a football match between two very evenly matched teams is instructive.  When two teams are evenly matched then the deciding factor on who is favourite is home advantage. But in England's case in the World Cup then this didn't apply. So when England qualified for the 2nd Round but then had to face Germany, almost certainly Argentina in the last eight, Spain in the sem-final and Brazil or Holland in the final then we base the strategy of looking at each game that England had to play around the "Even Money Concept". Tossing a coin is Even Money and the chances of you winning one coin toss are 50%.......two on the trot is 25%.......three is 12.5%.......four is 6.25%. So for England to win the World Cup then their chances were 6.25% at best as they would have to win four big games where they would not be favourites. But this all assumes that England would be a coin flip in these games. Against teams like Argentina, Brazil and Spain then they would certainly be underdogs and this would reduce the percentage chances even more. A better way of building from this example would be to look at England's chances as being 50% against Germany (silly in hindsight) and 33% maximum against the other three teams. This then reduces Englands chances of winning the World Cup to something under 2% which when equated to odds is around the 50/1 mark. So at 11.5/1 then this was a cast iron lay for me.