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How to win at football betting: tip #5

By Matt | February 7, 2010

I had a monster result on my coupon yesterday: five selections, all of which finished in a draw. What are the chances, eh? Sadly for me, I’d backed a team to win in each case and every one of my ten trebles, five fourfolds and an acca went belly up.

This freak occurence led me to consider the role of the draw in football betting, and prompted me to share my fifth general football betting tip: steer clear of draws, especially in multiples.

In sports betting terms, and especially in football, the draw fulfils the same function as the green zero in roulette. It’s the vig; it’s the house edge; it’s where the bookie makes his dough.

Drawn matches and random numbers
Historically, draws have always been seen as random, unpredictable events. In the dark days before the National Lottery, draws played a role as a random number generator for the football pools.

For those too young to remember the pools, you picked eight numbers from a list of about fifty where each number corresponded to a game being played on the following Saturday afternoon. If one of the games you’d selected finished as a draw it was like your ball being drawn on today’s Lotto: if all eight matches finished tied you won the jackpot.

You could study the form if you wished but few people did. Most people picked the same numbers each week, like they do with the National Lottery today. You had the same chance of winning: even back then Littlewoods, who ran the pools, realised that tied games were fiendishly difficult to predict; a pre-Camelot Merlin in an age when pure lotteries were banned.

The draw: a bookies’ result
Nowadays draws generally mean a busted flush for the punter. In a match between, say, Liverpool and Leeds at Anfield, the bookies will aim to make a margin of profit whichever side wins the game. More people will bet on Liverpool winning so they’ll shorten their odds and lengthen those of Leeds to minimise their losses if Liverpool win and tempt people to bet on the team most likely to lose.

If Leeds win then you’d assume the bookies would be delighted: all the punters who backed Liverpool have lost their money. However, most punters tend to back one side or the other, so for every pound the bookies win on Liverpool losing, they’re likely to have to pay out 80 or 90p to the punters who backed Leeds.

But if the match is drawn then, of course, they win both ways: they keep the lot, except for the few brave, perceptive or daft punters who bet on a draw. Like I said earlier, it’s like the ball landing on zero in roulette.

When to bet on the draw
The Cunning Punt philosophy suggests that, working counter-intuitively against the herd, there’s therefore money to be made betting on draws. And sometimes there is.

Big games in major championships frequently end in draws as, at the highest level, teams’ tactics tend to cancel each other out or, sadly, sides become more fearful of losing than ambitious of winning.

Also, if an Italian team ever needs a point to qualify for something, you can generally expect them to expend just enough energy to get the result they need (as they did against Ireland in qualifying for World Cup 2010).

In all such cases if the odds available make the risk worthwhile then a punt on the draw is the best call, of course.

But in general they don’t. For all the random nature of draws, bookies price them up as if every third game ended in a tie.

Out of 54 games played in the English Premier League, Football League and Conference yesterday, only 15 ended in draws: between 27 and 28 per cent. If draws are as random as the pools organisers believed then any game should be roughly priced as about 11/4, and yet you frequently see prices between 2/1 and 5/2 quoted about the draw.

That makes draws phenomenally bad value for me, especially in a multiple bet. If the chance of picking one draw is 28 per cent then the chances of picking three in a treble are just over two per cent: you can expect little more than one win in fifty bets, and yet you’d probably only win £43 to every pound staked: an overall loss of 14-15 per cent.

No wonder then that a high number of draws in football is seen as good news for the bookies. Consider this quote from the Financial Times the other week:

“In the third quarter the company lost a fifth of its revenue from betting shops as the start of the football season saw an unusually low number of draws, and wins from Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal.

“Those teams have since stumbled, while the number of draws has shifted back towards the norm. Shares in William Hill closed up 6.6p at 192.2p.”

The US perspective: no bets, no draws
With this in mind it’s interesting to compare British and American attitudes to tied games. In Britain, where professional sport has grown hand-in-hand with gambling ever since the earliest days of cricket, draws are valid results and commonplace.

And yet in the US, where sports betting has always been illegal and/or frowned upon, tied games don’t exist. We have legal bookies; they have overtime. Go figure.

And stay away from betting on draws.

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