Sports betting can seem complicated when you first start playing. You may be tempted to place a bet on your favourite team or on a reality TV programme but the variety of odds offered by different bookmakers may seem a little baffling.
But just what do those betting odds mean and how can you be sure that you are getting the best deal?
All odds really are a bookmakers™ view of the chance of the subject winning. They are usually expressed as a fraction and in order to work them out you need to divide the first number by the second to get a multiplier.
So if there are odds of 20/1 and you bet £20 and your bet wins, then you would get £20 back as well as your stake. With straightforward odds like 20/1 i’ts pretty simple to work out but what about if the odds are 6/4? Well if you bet a £1 you need to divide six by four to get the multiplier(1.5) so if you bet £1 on 6/1 you will get £1.50 back, plus your stake.
Once you have worked out what you will get for your cash it’s time to learn some of the terminology. Odds are set either at even money, odds against or odds on. Evens are odds of 1/1 and that simply means that for every £1 bet you will get a £1 back if you win, plus your stake, and it is considered to be an equal chance that the bet will win – it’s basically a 50/50 chance.
If it’s an odds against bet this means that if your bet wins you will get more back then you put on, so if there are odds of 3/1 you will get £3 for every £1 bet plus the stake.
An odds on bet means that if the bet wins you will get less back and you win less then you put on. So with odds of 2/1 you will get 50p back for every £1 bet, plus the stake.
Other terms that you may hear are short or long odds. Short odds shows that the selection has a good chance of winning so you won’t win much if you do win the bet so for example a 6/4 bet will be considered short. While long odds mean that the selection has a poor chance of winning, so you will get more back for your stake, so for example odds of 50/1 will be considered long odds.
