• How Often Do Favorites Win In Football Draft
• How Often Do Nfl Favorites Win

Everybody likes to cheer for the underdog, but hardly anyone bets on the underdog to win. We tend to put our money on the favorite most of the time. In fact, we bet on the favorite far more frequently than we should. To understand why, you have to understand some of the basic functions and malfunctions of human decision-making.

Filling out a winning March Madness bracket is difficult, but the process itself is simple. All you have to do is pick a winner for each game in your bracket. Most of the time, sports betting is more complicated than that. It’s easy enough to pick the favorite to win, but what if we were to say the favorite has to win by at least eight points? And what if that eight-point spread were carefully crafted to make the game a toss-up — who would you pick then? This is the type of decision sports bettors have to make all the time.

In 2004, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt identified the fact that point spreads aren’t set like typical market prices, by equating relative levels of supply and demand. Instead, bookmakers set the margin to make the chance of the favorite covering the spread to be roughly 50 percent. Levitt speculated that bookmakers substantially improve their profits by biasing the spread very slightly against the favorite. This approach is profitable for bookmakers in part because, despite facing virtually even odds, people are much more likely to bet on the favorite than the underdog.

The question that Levitt’s research left unaddressed is why people show such a strong bias towards favorites. As digital editor of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, I come across many studies, and I found a compelling answer to this question in the research of Joseph Simmons, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Leif Nelson, associate professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Simmons and Nelson say that people’s confidence in their own intuitions — regardless of whether that confidence is justified — guides their decision-making.

“When people decide how to bet on a game, first they identify who is going to win,” Nelson said. That decision is often fast and easy, particularly when teams are not evenly matched. “The faster and easier it is, the less concerned they are with correcting that intuition when answering the more difficult question of whether the favorite is going to beat the point spread.”

This led us to wonder: how often do the favourites actually win? How often does the favourite football team win? Let’s consider the 2018-2019 season. At InnerDrive HQ, we analysed every match in the 2019-19 Premier League season and found that favourites only win 57.9% of the time and, surprisingly, lose 42.1% of their matches. If the favourite has their serve broken you might often find that they win the serve back very quickly. When this happens they will then usually return to their starting price despite the underdog showing that they have it in them to break the favourites serve. In my view, if it has already happened once then it can easily happen again and this.

For all but the most experienced bettor, determining whether the favorite will beat the spread is incredibly challenging. Keeping in mind that the spread is carefully calibrated to make the choice a virtual coin flip, people simply don’t have much to go on besides their intuition. And because their intuition strongly suggests that the favorite will win, in the absence of information to the contrary it also tells them that the favorite will beat the spread. In a game between two fairly evenly matched teams, people’s feelings of confidence in the favorite to win are diminished, and they’re much less likely to pick the favorite to cover the spread.

Simmons and Nelson analyzed betting data on 1,008 regular season NFL games on Sportsbook.com from 2009 to 2012. They found the average share of money bet on the favorite was 65 percent. This confirmed their initial study in which they tracked data from thousands of predictions of 850 professional and college football games on Yahoo.com for the 2003 and 2004 seasons. There Simmons and Nelson found, just as Levitt did, that even though favorites were about 50 percent likely to beat the spread (413 favorites beat the spread, 415 did not, and 22 were ties), people bet on the favorite more than two-thirds of the time. In fact, the more people believed a certain team would win, the more likely they were to also choose that team to beat the spread. Put another way, the confidence bettors felt in picking the winner translated into an unrelated belief that the winner would beat the spread.

Simmons and Nelson also ran a series of studies in a controlled laboratory setting. They made sure that people knew exactly what it meant to bet the spread. In addition to asking people who they thought would win the game and how confident they were in their choice, the researchers asked them to estimate the margin of victory. Remarkably, people continued to overwhelmingly bet that the favorite would cover the same spread they had just personally estimated. And, once again, the more confident people felt that a team would win, the more likely they were to bet that the team would beat the spread.

Astute gamblers may have noticed that although the bias towards favorites is a persistent one, it doesn’t appear to cost people very much. If the point spread is calibrated to give favorites a 50 percent chance of beating it, then even if people bet on the favorite every time, they should win half their bets, just as they would if they always bet on the underdog or chose at random. In another paper, however, Simmons and Nelson, along with Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University and Shane Frederick of Yale University, found that favoritism towards favorites persists even when the playing field is tilted in favor of the underdog. People continued to show a bias toward picking favorites to cover the spread even when points were added to the spread dropping the favorites’ odds below 50 percent. Even explicitly telling people that the spread was artificially inflated didn’t stop them from making the costly error.

Luckily, as you scramble to fill out your March Madness bracket, you don’t have to pick against spreads. You just have to pick who will win each game, something your intuition is pretty good at doing. So, in this case, go right ahead: Follow your gut and pick the favorites.

My experience with Tennis Trading has shown me that the most lucrative opportunities often crop up when you have a strong favourite (1.40 and below) who does not quite live up to expectations.

Trying to spot a strong favourite that might “flop” before the match is often impossible. They are priced at such low odds by the markets for a reason and that reason is usually statistical. If you try and look in the statistics for a reason to take on a strong favourite then it is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The best way to spot heavy favourites that might struggle or lose is by actually watching the match in-play and seeing how they get on.

The tennis markets are quite rigid and stubborn which can actually be a good thing. For example, you could have a player like Rafael Nadal start the match priced @ 1.02 but if he is showing signs of having an off day you will still find you can lay him at low odds before the markets realise he might be in for a harder match then expected. I regularly love to take on the low priced favourites since it is usually so low risk but with high potential rewards and here are some of the things I look for.

This might sound like an obvious thing to look for but let me explain. If the favourite has their serve broken you might often find that they win the serve back very quickly. When this happens they will then usually return to their starting price despite the underdog showing that they have it in them to break the favourites serve. In my view, if it has already happened once then it can easily happen again and this is a good time to lay the favourite for the next few games to see what develops. If it seems like the favourite now has the match under control then you can just exit for a small loss. As mentioned, its a small risk but if the underdog was to break through once again then you could see an even bigger swing then the one you missed out on.

The biggest opportunities often arrive when the first set is much tighter then it should be when the favourite is meant to be so strong. If you see the underdog is holding serve well and the score goes to 3-3, 4-4 etc then this is a great time to lay the strong favourite. If the underdog is holding serve well then there is every chance that he might score a break point or take the set into a tie break where anything can happen.

A recent example of this was found in Nadal’s amazing exit from Wimbledon. Nadal was having a very hard first set against Rosol with the first set going to a tie break at 6-6. The highest Nadal traded during that first set was 1.06 and, as we all know, he ended up losing!

If I have not had a chance to lay a strong favourite during the 1^st set which then goes to a tie break then you can be sure I will be laying them in the tie break. This is the tennis equivalent of a penalty shoot out and if the favourite is strong enough they will usually still be hovering around their starting price when the tie break begins which is excellent value.

In a tie break you don’t even need the underdog to win it to get a big swing in odds since just going 2 points behind is enough for a big market swing. A good example of this was Serena Williams exit from the French Open. The 2nd set went to a tie break with Williams not trading higher then 1.10 at that point and actually trading as low as 1.01 during the tie break. However, once she lost the tie-break the match was level at 1 set each with one more set to decide it where anything could happen from that point.

As we all know, she went and lost the match. It would not have cost you many ticks to have taken on Williams before the tie break since there was a huge amount of ticks to be gained if she ended up losing it!

This does not happen often but happened to great effect in the French Open with Andy Murray. If a strong favourite shows any indication that they might be struggling with injury and the markets have not yet reacted then I will instantly just lay the player for a bit to see what happens.

If the injury begins to affect their play then you can often gain a huge market swing as the markets will go into sheer panic when a player looks like he is struggling with injury. In the Andy Murray example, he began the match @ 1.10, drifted to 1.25 when looked like he was struggling a bit and then drifted out to 3.25 once it was clear he really did have an injury and everyone panicked!

How Often Do Favorites Win In Football Draft

If the favourite does go on to win the set or break point you wont lose that many ticks by exiting the trade at this point since this is what everyone expects so you should not be afraid of taking them on. You have a small amount to lose but a huge amount to gain if you pull it off.

Just remember, when trading Tennis you aren’t even necessarily looking for the favourite to lose the match, you just want them to have a bit of a struggle on the way to create the market volatility we can profit from. If you look out for the signs above you will definitely find them!

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How Often Do Nfl Favorites Win

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