Arbitrage Betting​

Content curated from and authored by Clear Data Sports

Less about sports and more about the mathematics, arbitrage betting (also known as arbing) is when you place bets on all possible outcomes of a particular event (usually only events that have two possible outcomes), and at odds that guarantee you will make a profit regardless of the result.

Arbitrage Betting Explained

Sometimes called surebets, miraclebets, or surewins, arbitrage betting is about finding the discrepancies in posted odds at different bookmakers and then using those differences to your financial advantage.

Bookmakers don’t like arbing, for obvious reasons. They pay out money for their own mistakes. But it is perfectly legal, and most bettors in the business recognize that it is a perfectly legitimate way to play a long-term betting strategy.

An example of how it works:

Let’s say you want to bet on the Wimbledon Final and Sportsbook One has Roger Federer at +150, while Sportsbook Two has Novak Djokovic at -135. If you put $100 on Djokovic and he wins, you would get a payout of $174.10, for a profit of $74.10.

So to “arb” this bet, you need to calculate how much you need to bet on Federer to guarantee a profit between both bets.

With odds of +150, you would only need to bet $70 on Federer to get a payout of $175. The total of your two bets was $170, which means you net $5 in profit. If Djokovic is the winner, your profit is $4.10 ($174.10 minus the $170 in bets).

Sometimes you also see competing moneyline bets between two sportsbooks that don’t match up. If the Avalanche are +110 at Sportsbook One, and their opponent the Canucks are +110 at Sportsbook Two, put $100 down on each result. You are guaranteed to make $10 no matter what happens.

Finding Arbitrage Opportunities

The more you place arb bets, the easier the opportunities are to recognize. If the positive odds on the moneyline are greater than the negative odds, that’s a game ripe for arbing.

If the implied win probability of the two teams/opponents is less than 100 percent, that is an arbing opportunity.

And once you find those opportunities, you then need to make sure you bet the appropriate amounts to guarantee yourself a winner. You can do the math yourself, as we did up above, or you can find an arbitrage betting calculator online and have it crunch the numbers for you.

Is Arbitrage Betting Profitable?

Yes, if arbitrage betting is done correctly, you should make money doing it. Again, using our example from above, as you can see, it’s not a lot of money.

It is possible to find small discrepancies in odds that can be exploited for your gain. But since those differences are never very large, you aren’t going to take home big payoffs. They simply don’t exist.

But if you stay disciplined and always cover your bets with the amount that an arbitrage bet requires, it can be an effective long-term strategy for staying profitable.