The underdog has a positive money line. So it's all in units of 100. So anyway, you can take these money lines, and what they do is they shade one of the money lines so that there's a slight imbalance so it isn't a fair bet. That if you bet on both teams you break even.
So when they do that, what they'll do is they'll take 20 points off the underdog line, starting with some number that they think is good for dividing the betting action again. The bookmaker makes a certain profit. And in fact, for a typical baseball bet, the hold percentage will be in the neighborhood of 4%. Similar to point spread bets. So baseball, just betting on a team in baseball, yields about the same profit margin for casinos per dollar bet. and it depends very much on how much money is bet on each team in a game. But anyway, so typically that's what bookmakers make though on baseball betting, somewhere around 4%. Well, if you do that, if the swindler had been making random bets with a 4%, 3.8% house edge for that whole run of $110 million, he would have lost about $4 million. If he actually was using any skill in baseball betting, he might have even done better paypal online casino nz. He might have lost less than $4 million. But you can have skill and still lose money, of course. You can have skill and just do worse than randomness, and because of the odds, you can still go broke. So you can be skillfully bankrupt. But in any event, this guy lost $30 million. So the question is was he being cheated? Well it turns out there's another kind of baseball bet called a parlay bet. Some of you may know what a parlay bet is. Parlay bet just means you bet on a bunch of different events and they all have to happen for you to win. So for example, here's a 14-- and you can do that in any sport-- here's a 14 parlay. You bet that San Francisco beats Florida, Pittsburgh beats Milwaukee, Oakland beats Kansas City, and the Yankees beat Boston. If you make that bet, all those teams have to win in order for you to win your bet, otherwise you lose. So the payoff odds are somewhat high. They're huge payoff odds. In fact, you get the payoff odds by multiplying the probabilities together for winning for each of those teams, roughly speaking. Taking a little bit off for the bookmaker profit. So it turns out that these types of bets are highly profitable if you win, but on the other hand, there's a huge house edge or hold percentage because the casinos don't want to expose themselves to the risk of taking huge parlay bets because of the big payoff odds. So they'll make the odds such that they're not so good for the bettor. So a typical 14 parlay bet, the house edge is between 25% and 30%. The same is true if you make-- if you look at games with high payoff odds, the house edge is always worse, like the State Lottery, for instance. The house edge equivalent is 50%. The State keeps 50% of all the money bet. Keno is another game. If you've seen the game of Keno in a casino, that's a type of lottery. Keno bets typically have a 20% to 30% house edge because you can win a whole lot of money for a $1 bet. So on games like that have very high payoffs with a very low chance of winning, the house edge is typically high. So these 14 parlay bets, this guy was betting 4, 5 and 16 parlay bets generally. So he was exposing the casino to-- he was betting $15,000 a bet, these 14, 15, 16 parlay bets. So any win, he would get hundreds of thousands of dollars. So the online casino was hesitant to take the money on such large bets. They don't usually, so they spread it out around other casinos, so the money trail gets sort of dispersed. And anyway, let's just look at the bottom line. Let's say the house edge is about 27.5%. And that's what this guy was doing was making these parlay bets. And the $110 million bet, you multiply by 27.5%, you get $30 million. And that's exactly what the guy lost. So I'm going to stop with that because we're running out of time, but I will answer questions. Anybody want any other information, just come on up and get it. Thank you very much.
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AuthorTom Diez is a professional gambler and blogger on gambling topics. He writes casino reviews for Casinoslots Gambling Directory. Tom was born in Argentina, he moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago. Tom also likes traveling, extreme sports and Weebly.) ArchivesCategories |