Horse Racing, greyhounds and snooker specialist with thirty years experience of writing about sport across multiple platforms. A QPR and Snooker fan
My football writing has been thin on the ground recently, mostly because I have been devoting a lot of time to horse racing
But I am hoping to step up my football blogs over the next couple of weeks, with Asian Handicap betting to the fore over this period.
The last football blog I wrote was an explanation of Asian Handicap betting, which I thought it was worth writing, because there would be a few readers who do not understand this type of bet.
Hopefully, anyone who falls into this category will now be able to understand the AH well enough to benefit from a little bit more information about it.
In this blog, I am going to explain the maths behind why I like the Asian Handicap. At the most basic level, the way bookmakers work is to offer odds that mean that they can make a profit regardless of the result of a sporting event.
A symptom of this is that if you calculate the percentage chance of all the outcomes as suggested by the odds on offer, then add together these percentages, the total is likely to be more than 100%.
If bookmakers offered odds where the outcome of doing this was 100%, then they would probably expect to break even on their books in the long-run; obviously they have other costs to take into account, so this would mean they made a loss overall.
They take this into account in their prices to aim and make a profit on their books that is big enough to cover their costs and then provide a profit for themselves.
The amount over 100% that the odds work out at is called over-round or vigorish, bookmakers will always offer odds that have this, and I am not criticising them, because that is their business.
One of the reasons I have always liked the Asian Handicap is that I believed this over-round was smaller in that market than many.
In other words, bookmakers are making less money from the Asian Handicap than they are from other markets and this has to be good for punters in my opinion.
I decided to have a look at the facts to see if my belief was correct and what I found out was quite interesting. I had the odds from seven different bookmakers for all the Premier League games so far this season (up to and including the 9th of November).
As well as this I had the odds for the Asian Handicap, the data I have is only the average amount for the AH at various bookmakers and the best odds available for each match.
The results showed a couple of interesting things. Firstly the vast difference between bookmakers was quite interesting, the bookmaker with the smallest over-round on average was Pinnacle Sports with just over 2%, the worst was Interwetten with just over 8%.
I have to be fair to Interwetten and say that they operate mostly in countries other than England, so perhaps it would be unfair to expect them to be the most competitive for the league, but they were by no means the only firm that had an average over-round over 5%.
From the point of view of Asian Handicaps though, the news is that the best AH lines available had an average over-round of less than 0.7%, and even the average prices with an over-round of 3.8% on average were pretty competitive, given that this would take into account the worse AH odds available as well.
So it seems that bookmakers are more generous with the odds for Asian Handicap lines than they are for 1X2 bets, but why is this?
Well I think the answer could be quite simple. When we look at odds for an AH line we know that there are two possible outcomes (ignoring the push where there are no odds offered), and we know that they are supposed to be roughly equally likely.
It is therefore easy to see that the odds should be roughly even money, if one is slightly more than even money we would expect the other to be less, if they are both significantly below even money then we would be able to see that there wasn't much value quite easily.
With 1X2 betting, it is sometimes a lot harder to see if the odds represent good value, usually the three events are not equally likely, so it is not the case that they will all be priced similarly at just below 2/1.
This means it is very difficult to work out roughly how big the over-round is in your head, and I believe this is what allows bookmakers to make a little bit more of an over-round on this market.
If you look at the market for a horse race, the over-round tends to be even bigger than for the 1X2 market for football.
So perhaps it is because the AH market has just two outcomes to bet on that the over-round is so attractive on Asian Handicap markets.
Next time I am going to outline exactly what type of AH bet I like to make, if you like to mix and match bets please check the betting school article on different types of bet used in sports betting.
