Evaluating Boosts - Advantage: Bettor
If you’re sophisticated enough to be reading this, you probably have some vague notion of particular bets being +EV. As I’ve mentioned before, there are dozens of accounts on Twitter that dedicate themselves to evaluating whether a particular bet (usually a boost) is worth betting or not. There’s the aptly named @BoostRater, @ThePromoGuy123, and @PromoGuyMI.
While these all provide a service - letting you know when a particular boost is +EV - there are two drawbacks. First, they don’t tell you how they arrived at a particular conclusion, so you’re left relying on these accounts and hoping their methodology is sound. Second, they don’t evaluate every boost across every site, so you’re left scratching your head when you see, say, a boost to +225 on Superbook for the Phillies and Padres to win. How are you supposed to tell whether that’s a good bet or not? Let’s use this particular boost as an example for how to evaluate boosts.
Before we get started, there are a few tools you’ll need to get familiar with in order to start evaluating boosts. In particular:
Pinnacle. Pinnacle is widely regarded as one of the “sharpest” books in the world. This means that its odds, compared to just about any other gambling operator, are more likely to reflect the actual implied probability of something happening with only minimal “vig” taken out. I use Pinnacle, whenever possible, as the control measure, so if I ultimately determine that a boost is +10% EV, the baseline for what the probability is of a particular event occurring is determined by the Pinnacle odds. I know this sounds like gobbledygook right now, but stay with me.
CrazyNinjaMike’s Devigger. It is difficult to underestimate how much money this simple little website has made bettors over the past couple of years. The title gives away its purpose: this tool “de-vigs” the odds by removing the amount that the sportsbook operator intends to take as its cut of the bets. For example: suppose that there is an even football game between two teams. Both teams are equally matched, and, as a result, have equal odds of winning. It would not be surprising to see that both teams would be -110 to win, meaning a bettor would have to bet $110 on a team to win $100. If one person bets $110 on Team A and another bets $110 on Team B, the sportsbook will ultimately take $220 in bets from these two people and pay out $210. That’s $10 in profit for the sportsbook regardless of outcome. The “vig,” then, would be 4.8%, because that’s $10 (in profit for the sportsbook) divided by $220 (in bets it would take to make that profit).
This example is a wild oversimplification, but what CNM’s Devigger does is recognize that, if you have two teams that are playing each other and both are -110, the actual “fair value” of those bets - meaning what the odds would be if the sportsbook operator wasn’t taking any profit - would be +100, and both teams would have a 50% probability of winning.
What about when odds are slightly skewed? CNM’s Devigger makes some assumptions about how a sportsbook operator might distribute the “vig” between the favorite and the underdog. For example, if the odds for Team A to win are -200 and the odds for Team B to win are +160, the total “juice” is 5.1%, but it may be that the “juice” is a greater percentage of your bet if you bet the +160 than if you bet the -200. There are reasons for this (that we aren’t going to spend time on now), but the idea is that, ultimately, CNM’s Devigger will spit out what the “fair” odds are for each of the possible assumptions and help determine whether a bet is profitable.
FanDuel, Draftkings, and Superbook. It would be nice if there were Pinnacle odds for every possible situation. There are not. There are some situations where, because a couple of different events are correlated, we cannot determine the “baseline” odds from Pinnacle. For example, there may be a boost for the Tampa Bay Bucs to win and for Tom Brady to throw 250+ yards. Those two events are correlated, since the Bucs are more likely to win if Tom Brady has a good game and far more likely to lose if he stinks. We need a way to determine the baseline odds for those situations, and the Same Game Parlay tools on Draftkings and FanDuel help us do that.
Likewise, we sometimes need to evaluate player props that aren’t available on Pinnacle. Today, for instance, Aaron Judge is trying to hit his 61st home run. Plenty of sites have odds for Aaron Judge to hit a home run. However, to determine what the “fair” odds are for this to happen, we ideally would want to use a site that offers the odds for Aaron Judge not to hit a home run as the baseline. Draftkings and Superbook both offer this. As a result, I typically use these three sites as “fallback” options if Pinnacle cannot give me what I need.
Before we jump into actually evaluating a boost, I want to make clear the assumptions that we are making that underlie our evaluations:
Our baseline odds are fair. When we use Pinnacle (or some other site, if we have to) to determine the baseline odds, we are assuming that those odds are fair and correct. It’s possible that they sometimes aren’t. Maybe Pinnacle (and the other sportsbook operators, in all likelihood) are missing some vital fact that significantly skews their odds the wrong direction so our boost evaluation is, ultimately, off. This worries some new bettors, since there is, on some level, an inability to ever truly know what the “correct” odds are for a particular event.
That’s okay. If you’re worried about this risk, you can compensate by only making bets that are sufficiently +EV to offset this concern. Ultimately, though, I expect that this all shakes out in the long run. Sometimes the odds that the providers have will be off in your favor, sometimes they’ll be off the other way, but in the long run, it will all trend towards even. My evidence of this is that this particular approach has been profitable, and that’s good enough for me.
The vig is distributed in the manner assumed by the devigger. As I mentioned above, CNM’s Devigger spits out a few different numbers about what the “fair value” of a particular bet is based on how it believes the vig is distributed between the two sides. It’s possible that none of these are quite right for a given situation, but, by and large, at least one of them is likely a good “fit” for the situation in question. For now, we’re going to just use all the options (multiplicative, additive, power, and Shin) and essentially use the “worst” option. This is the same as the “worst case scenario” option for the devigger, but without having to mess with as many settings (and to learn how this stuff works more). The idea is that if the “worst case scenario” is still moderately +EV, you’re probably in good shape.
Now let’s get to the actual boost evaluation. As I mentioned, the boost we’re going to be look at as an example is on Superbook, under Dom’s Wildcard Double. The boost is for the Padres and Phillies both to win, apparently boosted for +205 to +225:
First rule here: pay only limited attention to the “BOOSTED from” number. That number is very often inaccurate. We’re going to take a look at this one without any reference to that +205 number at all.
A simple but overlooked part of this is to make sure you know what the boost is for. Here, it’s pretty clear: the Phillies and Padres both need to win. Those are two independent events; it’s parlaying the moneyline for these two teams.
What we need to do next is figure out what the odds are for the Phillies to win and the odds are for the Padres to win. For that, we turn to Pinnacle. First, the Phillies play the Cubs:
This means that the Phillies are -160 to win (they’re listed first, so they’re the first number), and the Cubs are +147 to win. We need both of these numbers. We also need the same for the Padres/Dodgers game:
So the Padres are -109 to win (listed second, so they’re the second number), and the Dodgers are +101. We now have all the ingredients we need to hop over to the devigger.
First things first: leave the “Kelly Multiplier” and “Kelly Bank Roll” stuff where it is. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that right now; that’s for a much later lesson. As for “devig method”, we’re going to go with “Show All.” Let’s not limit ourselves:
Now it’s time to enter our odds. The way you enter these into the devigger is to list the odds for the event you need to occur first. Then, separating with a slash, put the odds of the other outcomes. This is easy in a case like this: we need the Phillies to win, and they’re -160. The other outcome is for the Cubs to win, and that’s +147. So we type in -160/147, like so:
(You don’t need the “+” part - it’s implied - but you can put it in there if you want).
Now we need to incorporate the Padres portion of the boost. This is an entirely separate and independent event, so, after typing the odds for the Phillies portion, we put a comma. Then, we type in -109/101, since the odds for the Padres to win are -109 and the other outcome (Dodgers to win) is +101, like so:
Now our “leg odds” portion of this is done. The “final odds” are easy - that’s the odds that we’re getting after the boost. Here, that’s +225, so we type in “225.”
The rest of the stuff we leave alone: there is no correlation here, and we aren’t using a profit or odds boost. All we do now is push “calculate,” and, voila!
Okay, so that’s a lot of numbers. What the devigger just did is determine what the “juice” is for each leg of the parlay under each method. It then calculated the fair value of each leg under each method, the fair value of the “final odds,” and, as a result, what % EV the bet is.
There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that, under every method, this is a +EV boost! The bad news is that, under every method, the value of the boost is very, very small. The max bet for this boost is $50; a boost that is +0.3% EV will, in the long run, yield…..$0.15 per $50 bet. That’s not very good.
I’m more aggressive than most people, and I am comfortable betting boosts (most of the time) that have limited EV. This, though, is too low even for me, so I’d stay away.
This is, at its heart, what all those boost evaluators are doing: they’re trying to use existing odds to determine what the “fair odds” would be for a particular bet, measuring what the EV is when comparing the boost to the “fair odds,” and deciding whether to make the bet or not.
We’ll get to more complicated examples down the road (when two bets correlate, or when you cannot cannot figure out exactly what the odds against a particular event are), but, at a minimum, you are hopefully now in a position to evaluate some of the simpler boosts that you might see.
If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to drop them below, and if you liked this, please subscribe and maybe drop a follow on Twitter (@adv_bettor). Thanks for reading!
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