Winner bets: How does this market work?

There are plenty of bet types in the betting world. What are Winner bets and how do they work?

After all, how does the winner bets’ market work in a sporting event?

Before we exemplify how Winner Bets work, let’s talk about the different nomenclatures for this market that we can find in different “bookies”: winner, odds and 1 × 2 are the most used. In the case of football, we have three betting options: home team / visitor win and draw, as shown in the image below.

From bookie to bookie we have some variations, with respect to the margin, which in summary is the “profit” of the bookies, guaranteed regardless of the volume of winning bets in this market. In this example, we notice that the Winner Bet market is presented with the symbol “SO”, which means that the investments made before the event starts, do not have the usual profit margin for the “bookie”, which in this case would be 0. 

Let’s take the examples:

If we bet € 100 in favor of the home team, as shown in the image below, we would win € 310, however, to calculate the profit from this investment, we have to take the amount invested, which in this case is € 100. So, our return would be only 210 €. 

In the second example, the tie, as illustrated below, we would have a profit of € 283, if we had bet the same € 100 of the previous model, however, this increase in return is related to the higher quote offered by the house for this result . The higher the odd, the less likely that bet will turn out to be a winner.

Finally, we will calculate how much we would earn if we invested in the victory of the visiting team, in this case the favorite according to the market. It would be enough to multiply our € 100 by the odd, where we would have a potential return of € 239, which, subtracting the amount invested, ended with a profit of € 139. 

The formula presented below, exemplifies how we can correctly calculate the return of each bet:

Profit = stake (quote – 1)

What we covered in this article, was the operation of the 1 × 2 market, which through some criteria of development of probabilistic calculations can have interesting returns in the medium and long term.