The Formulas You Should Know Before Betting on Esports
You don’t need to be a statistician to bet on esports, but it would certainly help. If you want to get into esports betting and you can’t do quick math, a calculator might be a great investment. Whether you’re calculating odds or simply wondering how much return you should expect on a bet, you will be doing math at some point in your esports betting career. Some strong math can reduce your costs of esports betting, maximize your profits, and simply make it easier to understand what you’re actually doing when you place a bet.
I feel that it’s important at this point to disclaim that this article will in no way teach you how to “game the system.” Esports betting websites rely on people often losing their bets and wouldn’t be around if you could simply use a few simple formulas to prevent this. While these formulas can help prevent you from losing extraneous money and make bets more confidently, the odds of a bet will never reach 100%. They may hit 99.99999%, but that 0.00001% chance can always occur. Understanding the formulas contained within this article will make you one of the more informed esports bettors, but not a money-making machine.
Calculating Winning – The Most Important Formula
You’ll be happy to hear that the most important formula you need to know is also one of the simplest. Are you ready for it? You can calculate the success rate of your betting with the formula Y=X(Z).
In this formula, X represents the average odds of betting. While these can vary from book to book, you are most likely betting on 2.0 odds. To determine this number for yourself, simply add up the numbers on both sides of a bet. If you are betting using a book that uses ratios, it will be easiest to plug them in as a percentage. For example, 2:1 odds are 66.64% in favor of the “2” side. On the other hand, if the odds are written out as “1.77 vs. 0.33,” you can use 2 for X, although this is also a notation for a percentage.
Z, in this formula, represents the percentage of bets that you have won. If you don’t have exactly 100 bets to count on, calculating this number for yourself is fairly simple, as well. First, put the number of bets that you have won over the number of bets that you’ve placed. Let’s say for example that you have placed 45 bets, and of those, you’ve won 27. You’ll write this as 27/45. Then write an equation where the number equals X over 100. In this example, the equation now looks like 27/45 = X/100. We’ll then cross multiply (multiply the bottoms by the top) to get a new equation that looks like 2700 = 45(X). We can then divide both numbers by the number with X to find our percentage. In this case, we’ll divide 2700 by 45 to have a final equation of 60 = X. After all this math, we have a winning percentage; in this case, it’s 60. If you are less mathematically inclined, you can use a percentage calculator for this.
You do, unfortunately, have a little bit of math to do after this, but it is incredibly simple. For this formula, we’ll want to express the percentage as a decimal. Simply move the decimal two places to the left (if you don’t have a decimal, it’s at the end of the number). So, in our example, we would be using .6 for X.
Finally, multiply the two together to get Y. Assuming that we have 2.00 betting odds in our example, we’ll end up with Y=1.2. This tells us not only whether or not we are successful, but just how much of a success we are. If you have a number larger than 1, you are doing well. If you have a number smaller than 1, you are losing money. The further you get from 1, the truer this becomes. So, for example, a 1.8 means you are doing exceptionally well, while a .12 means you are losing 78% of your money. In this example, you’re getting a 20% return on your investment.
This formula is incredibly important for finding your metric of success, but also for determining what your breaking point is. If you are several digits away from 1, you may want to consider putting betting down for a while.
Expected Value – The Most Exciting Formula
If Y=X(Z) can tell you how well you’re doing, then Expected Value formulas are the way to convert that number into cash. For those unfamiliar, Expected Value is pretty much exactly what it says. Essentially, Expected Value tells you how much money you can expect to win or lose if you were to make a bet over and over again ad nauseam. For example, a bet of $5 for a return of $6 on a coin toss has an expected value of $0.50 if you were to make the bet repeatedly.
Expected Value, again, is fairly easy to calculate. The formula looks like this:(Probability of Winning) x (Amount Won per Bet) – (Probability of Losing) x (Amount Lost per Bet). So, in our example we would plug in these variables, a 50% chance of winning, winning $6, a 50% chance of losing, and $5 lost. This makes our formula look like .5(6)-.5(5). Remembering the order of operations, we’ll multiply first to get, 3-2.5. Subtraction is simple, and we get an expected value of $0.50. Easy, right?
Of course, the math gets increasingly complicated as more factors come into play; most esports matches will not boil down to simple percentages. That’s what’s most important about this formula. Knowing how to interpret expected value is one of the major differences between the average esports better and the professional. We will never be able to bet on the same game over and over again, so a high expected value means nothing and neither does a negative one. Instead, Expected Value can be used to determine risk. The closer the EV reaches to a median, the more we can expect that bet to be positive. You don’t want an event that sometimes has an EV of $100; you want an event that has many games with an EV of $10. A negative EV is rarely a good bet, but you may occasionally find places where the EV of winning is worth the risk of losing, which is the case in most “underdog” situations.