Value Bets: Where Our Prediction Model Odds Beat the Bookmakers’

Every set of odds is a percentage in disguise. We work out our own percentage for the same bet in our prediction model, and this page lists every one where our number is higher than theirs.

Odds of 10/11 mean the bookmaker thinks it lands 52% of the time. Evens is 50%. 1/2 is 67%. That is all a price is.

We work out the same figure from the records instead — how often a player has had two shots in his last 6 matches, how often two sides have both scored across their last 20 — and put the two numbers next to each other. Where ours is higher, the odds are longer than the record says they should be. That gap is the last column in the table.

The biggest gaps come first, whatever division they are in. A League One corners line sitting above most of the Premier League is worth seeing, and grouping by league would hide it.

What the Numbers Mean

A market percentage includes the bookmaker’s cut, which on these markets runs around 5%. Add up the implied probabilities either side of any line and they come to more than 100 — that surplus is the margin, and it is why an edge of two or three points is not really a disagreement at all.

The table starts at 8 points for that reason. Below it, our number and the price are broadly saying the same thing.

It stops at 20 points as well, and that bound matters more than the first. When our figure sits far above the bookmaker’s, the likelier explanation is a flaw in ours rather than a mistake in theirs — and our own settled results say so. Across the bets we settled on 1 and 2 September, gaps above 30 points returned nothing from 3 attempts and gaps of 20 to 29 returned one from 5. Gaps under 10 lost least of all.

Selections outside both bounds are still published, on the individual competition pages, with the reasoning that produced them. They are absent here because this table is about where the model and the market differ by an amount we can defend.

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What the Model Reads

Player lines come from the player’s own last 6 matches, checked against his rate per 90 minutes so a single big return does not flatter an average. A player under 450 minutes does not appear at all, because 4 goals in 266 minutes is a hot streak rather than a rate.

Team markets use both sides’ last 20 matches. Where a side has changed division those figures get weighted by level, because a promoted team’s record against weaker opposition flatters them — Coventry’s Championship corner count and Lincoln’s League One matches are both discounted in the rows above.

Card markets need the referee, and where no official has been appointed we use a league-average of 4.20 cards a game, the mean across the 25 referees we have measured. Any selection built that way is checked across the plausible range rather than at the average alone.

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By Division

• Premier League best bets — 18 selections in this band
• Championship best bets — 14 selections
• League One — 6 selections, our first round in the division

Every one of those pages carries the same list, filtered to its own competition. The numbers cannot disagree between them because there is only one set.