The Exchange is very useful – with all of the power of the Wisdom of Crowds we can estimate Fair Odds in a liquid market. However most secondary markets are illiquid, inefficient and/or biased on the exchange.

The good news is we can exploit these markets on the exchange. All we need is benchmark of exactly what the price should be – and then we can value bet or trade around this.

Successful value betting and trading are two branches of the same olive tree – we seek to back at higher odds (or lay at lower odds) than a “fair” price, and the proof in our methodology will be when the market converges into our price.

Imagine having access to a database that was fully liquid in all markets – with all of the Fair Odds in these secondary markets. We could use it to calculate value at the bookmaker – or even to take advantage of those inefficient markets on the exchange itself.

We build a tool to do exactly this – called the Game Centre.

The Game Centre provides a single “Fair Odds” for all goals markets in a football game. We build a correct score for each game using Match and Team xG from the xG tool and a straight Poisson distribution for each score permutation from 0-0 to 20-20.

We then take this market and factor in bias for 0-0 by directly hinging every correct score option against the fair odds on a liquid correct score or correct score 2 market. The remaining probability is redistributed amongst the market using a weighted utility function so that we always normalise to a sum of 100%. The Game centre is therefore a powerful bespoke hybrid model that both (1) generates markets using in-house xG lines and (2) tracks smart money, and adjusts accordingly.

This way, we can calculate any football-goals market without the need for any liquidity.

How do we find inefficient, illiquid or biased markets?

In Primary Competitions any secondary goals market will usually be inefficient all the way up to a few hours before kick off.

However – the more biased the market is, the better. Biased markets can exist when there is a lop-sided view of where the fair odds lie. For example, in markets with a “bookmaker boost” there may be more layers than backers in a market. That will make the price artificially high. 

A good tip for finding biased markets is to look for bets that have been boosted to a high EV at the bookmaker. The higher the EV, the more potential for bias. At bookiebashing we have a “boosts” tracker. We monitor the EV of a variety of daily boosts. Not many of our members are backing the “maximum £6 stakes” on a betway boost – however knowing this boost is big EV provides us with plenty of opportunity to exploit the exchange.