Arbitrage Betting

After noticing that 1.18 and 7.00 looked like a potential arbitrage bet by looking at 1.20 and 6.00 above, the next step is to calculate whether the odds represent a surebet. Luckily, there are plenty of online calculators available which do all the hard work for you. However, we can look at the actual calculations to see how things work behind the calculator.

Have You Found a Surebet?

Firstly, if not using an online arbitrage bets calculator, you need to work out the arbitrage percentage which identifies whether you have a surebet. As mentioned above, with an individual bookmaker, the total percentage of all outcomes in a sporting bet will add up to greater than 100% due to the overround.

Therefore, we are looking for opportunities where all outcomes from different bookies add up to less than 100% as this suggest that the bookies have different opinions on the outcomes. To calculate the arbitrage percentage, you can use the following formula:

Calculate Your Profit From Arbitrage Betting

Having found a surebet, we then need to calculate the profit we will receive based on the amount of money we are willing to invest. If, for example, you are wanting to place £500 stake on the tennis surebet above, you would calculate the profit using the following formula:

Arbitrage Profit Formula

The next step is to calculate how your investment needs to be broken down in terms of stakes across both bets. This is so that you are returning the same profit regardless of which outcome wins.

The idea is to return the same profit regardless of whether the first or second outcome is successful, so it is critical to use the correct stakes – if not, you could find that one outcome is more profitable than the other or that you actually lose money if one outcome wins. To calculate the individual stakes:

You therefore know that to make £4.89 profit from £500 (0.968% profit) you need to place a bet of £427.87 on Rafael Nadal to win at odds of 1.18 and £72.13 on Kyle Edmund to win at odds of 77.00. As you can see, this is quite a lot of work for less than £5.00 profit, but as mentioned, arbitrage betting calculators can take a lot of the manual work away from this process.

Calculating Your Stake For Outcome B

As an aside, it is also worthwhile knowing how to calculate the stake for outcome B if you know how much you plan to bet on outcome A.

Rather than the above approach where we split the total stake (£500) into two bets to guarantee the same profit, we can work out how much to place on outcome B if we have bet £500 just on outcome A.

This can be done using the following formula:

To work out total profit, you would then use the above figures in the following calculations:

So, by investing £584.29 in this match, you would make a profit of £5.71 if Nadal wins or £5.74 if Edmund wins.

Placing Arb Bets Via Betting Exchanges & Shops

As described above, we’ve talked about finding surebets by looking at online bookmakers and odds comparison sites to identify the best prices for each outcome in a sporting event. This isn’t the only arbing opportunity though – it is also possible to do this via betting exchanges and in betting shops.

For instance, you could use a betting exchange to back and lay a bet to create a guaranteed profit – along similar lines to trading in the financial markets – although an extra considerations is that you need to factor in the commission for using the service.

Similarly, there is also the practice of ‘sharbing’ where you can create an arbitrage opportunity by using an online bookie for one outcome and a betting shop for the second as shops are usually slower to respond to price changes than online bookies.