How do you win when betting Over/Under points or goal totals? What are the key things to keep in mind when making your selections? Today betting analyst Andrew Brocker helps us out by offering us key considerations and in the process hopefully help us improve our own success when betting on points or goal totals.
When I first began my journey as a betting analyst, my main focus was on head to head and handicap betting. I was soley focussed on who would win and by how much.
Although I was well aware of Overs/Unders and the potential to bet on whether a match would end above or below the goal or points total, it took me a while to pay any real attention to the prospect of actually betting them.
And to be honest, it wasn’t until a friend of mine made the claim that betting on points or goal totals was, in his words, a crapshoot.
Of course, this sort of claim only stirred my ambition and love for a challenge. “A crapshoot you say? Hmm, we’ll see about that.”
So I threw myself into analysing Over/Unders. And after a great deal of work and frustration and trial and error, I eventually developed an approach that has been quite successful for me in betting goal totals in football and point totals in the NFL and NBA.
And so in this article, I will share with you the key points of that approach in the hope that you too can improve your Over/Under betting.
#1 – Last Week Doesn’t Mean Much
Yes, recent form matters. But it doesn’t matter as much as most people think. At least when it comes to outwitting the odds.
Time and again, I will see people refer what a particular team has done in the last 3 weeks, 4 weeks or similar.
Yes, a club may have scored many goals or points in recent weeks or games. But does this really give you an accurate assessment of a team’s true potential to score?
No, not really.
To obtain a true assessment of a team’s potential to score you have to look deeper and you have to take a longer term view. Consider their scoring form over the last 20 matches, or even longer. It depends upon the sport, league and in general, the number and frequency of games played.
Yes, recent form should be taken into account. But a sure way to continually come out on the wrong side of an Over/Under bet, is to become easily seduced by a recent run of high or low scoring games.
And more to the point, it’s recent form that the naive betting public is often seduced by, which means their are opportunities in the Over/Under markets for those of us who like to consider true potential rather than impulsive knee-jerk reactions to a mere few weeks of form.
#2 – Track Ocurrences Not Averages
This is once again, something I see all too often, people quoting scoring averages when assessing a particular match.
Averages might be ok when analysing a particularly large sample size with scorelines of limited variance. But the problem is that even over a sample size of for example 15 matches, one irregular result can distort the average.
Consider the following hypothetical example.
Let’s say Chelsea have played 15 home matches with 45 total goals scored in those matches. That’s an average of 3 goals scored per match. The Over/Under 2.5 goals is paying even money. Looks tempting considering Chelsea’s home form in goal totals.
Now let’s say that two of those 15 matches were particularly high scoring, for example, a 4-2 and a 5-1 result, seeing a total of 12 combined goals scored. These two irregular results have severely distored the average, which would be 2.53 in the other 13 matches.
What may have looked like an excellent opportunity to bet the Over 2.5 goals, suddently seems less enticing.
So while averages can be helpful in large sample sizes, in general, it’s best to track occurences.
Look at how many times a team has gone over or under a particular goal total. In our Chelsea example, it could well be that while the average for the 15 home matches may be 3 goals per match, but that the actual number of times Chelsea home games have gone Over 2.5 goals could be less than 50% with a few high scoring matches giving an inaccurate and distorted impression. Perhaps Chelsea home games have only gone over 2.5 goals on 7 occasions.
Even if the average is 3 goals per match, would you feel good about betting the Over if the occurence rate was so low? Probably not.
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