Unlocking EV Betting: How Betting Exchanges like Sporttrade Can Boost Your EV Betting Profit

It’s been the definition of trendy but now, EV betting it’s making the leap from reddit to the mainstream. Those traveling in sports betting circles are constantly talking about ‘beating the market’ and in a world where information and pricing is king, finding positive expected value in bets becomes a bettor’s daily treasure hunt. Betting exchanges are a place where bounties can be plentiful. 

But, what is EV betting? How can I figure out how to find it, calculate it and how does Sporttrade’s exchange model help me to make more money in the long run?

Let’s back up first. 

EV Betting, defined.

Expected Value (EV) is a mathematical concept used to assess the potential profitability of a bet made repeatedly over time. Positive EV indicates that a bet is expected to yield a profit over the long run, while a negative EV suggests the bet is likely to result in losses. Successful EV betting bettors are skilled at identifying these opportunities, but of course, the bet has to actually win in order to see gains over time. 

How Sporttrade’s exchange model helps me find EV bets

EV Betting is all about finding value within a betting market when comparing oddsmakers lines against each other once you’ve established the true odds of an event to occur. Thanks to competitive odds and true market value, bettors on Sporttrade are able to find EV bets with higher efficiency. Unlike traditional sportsbooks, Sporttrade’s exchange matches buyers and sellers with a market maker and peer to peer model, nearly eliminating the need for a sportsbook’s margin (the vig, juce, etc) that’s typically included in the odds of every bet offered. This nearly ensures your bet will be taken up on the other side and that your odds are closer to an outcome's true odds. 

For EV bettors this is a huge advantage. Odds closer to true value means bettors are more likely to find value opportunities. Repeatedly ID’ing these bets relative to the market can help a bettor lock in EV bets consistently and theoretically profits in the long run.

Calculating EV bets

An EV bet is calculated by multiplying the true probability of an event occurring by the potential payout and subtracting the true probability of losing the bet multiplied by the stake. In order to go ahead and calculate this, make sure you’re converting the odds you’re seeing into true odds in order to find EV bets. To do this, there are a number of ‘no vig’ calculators available throughout the sports betting internet you can plug in and see how much vig you’re being charged (they can be found on OddsJam or Unabated, for example). On Sporttrade, the vig isn’t much at all. 

Once you’ve done that, plug those true probabilities into the formula and find your expected value. 

EV = (True Probability of Winning * Potential Profit) - (True Probability of Losing * Stake)

Another way to calculate EV is to take True Probability of Winning, subtract the Implied Probability of your bet, and multiply the difference by the Total Potential Return (Stake plus Potential Profit).

So, if you place a $1,000 bet at +150, a 40% implied probability, and the true probability of winning is 41%, then your EV is (41% - 40%) x $2,500 of potential return = $25.

Are there any Additional Advantages?

Yes! Our exchange model also allows you to input limit orders (in New Jersey) where you can request an even better price from the market. This empowers EV bettors even further by offering even more favorable odds. These requests typically get filled by either the market maker or another user, provided you’re requesting odds above the midpoint. What’s that? Let’s look at an example.

The Steelers are underdogs in week 1 of the NFL season against the 49ers at home. The Sporttrade price is +138, or $41.5 per share (this is just a probability). 

You see a ‘Buy’ and “Sell’ price. These two numbers are known as The Spread. The average of the spread is typically what the market maker believes is the true price of an outcome to occur. So we can infer that the true probability of the Steelers Moneyline market is 40.75% (41.5 + 40 = 81.5, divided by 2). 

When we go to place our limit order, we can choose what odds we’d like to bet into. In this example, we’ve used the slider to change our odds from +138 ($41.5) to +141 ($41). Because this is above the midpoint, it has a great chance of being filled by either our market maker or another user and you just picked up a few extra cents. 

Bettors also get a transparent view of each market to know exactly how many dollars of liquidity are available in that very moment. Sporttrade has an online order book to show you the depth of market to determine if you want to bet into a higher price point (this may come at the cost of some EV, however). That is available here.

EV and in-play betting

Sporttrade is the only live-betting venue where you can cash out of your bets for 95-97% of its true market value. That’s great, sure, but because of tight spreads and true pricing, it’s also an in-game EV betting dream. 

In-game is where many sportsbooks decide to throw their hands up and copy the pricing of the sharpest sportsbooks. Sporttrade would rather create our own pricing as close to the market’s true value as possible. This helps bettors by providing a ‘source of truth’ to understand how a market should be priced, allowing them to survey additional markets for outliers, arbitrage opportunities (like EV betting calculators, there are plenty of sports betting arbitrage calculators out there) or additional EV betting wagers. 

Conclusion

EV bettors benefit in many ways by using Sporttrade’s exchange model in order to become profitable in the long run. There’s no surefire way to create profit purely by betting on sports (there is a way to do this in the short term, see our article about using Sporttrade for Matched Betting) but consistently finding EV opportunities gives you the best opportunity.