How to price up a football match?

They pick a rough starting point to get the ball rolling then move the odds to balance the book. "WE" price it up for them.

How will the others bet ?
What will the punters bet ?
What's the lowest we can price the favourite at ?

Its true they are influenced these days by the market here, and by what they think the 'mugs' will back .

They will still have their own opinions though.

The basis for any consistent pricing method is a rating system:

A match between teams of equal abilty on neutral ground maybe 15/8 each of them with the draw at 9/4 . ( Bookies % more like 13/8 , 13/8 + 2/1 )

Then as the difference in ratings between the 2 teams becomes greater they would shorten Team A to the next price down and lengthen Team B to the next one up ( with the draw getting progressively larger)

13/8 13/8
6/4 7/4
11/8 15/8
5/4 2/1
6/5 9/4
11/10 5/2
etc

all wrong, virtually all football matches priced up by bookmakers are directly influenced by Asia,

bookies will price up wrong sometimes on matchs deliberately, my opinion. dont know much about how asian markets affect the betting , asians are big gamblers.

they guess


just like this thread.

;)

This is a good read: http://www.havebet.com/content/who-controls-world-market-prices

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/fink_tank/article5576644.ece

This gives a rough and ready means of getting an approximate calculation. I don't use it myself but you could test it and compare to actual prices.
The Poisson distribution tends to underestimate the draw prices though because of how points are awarded per game.
Also it might be an idea to have a limit on goals scored per game, so as not give too much credence to freak results, such as spurs winning 9-1.

Thanks for the link slimfast, interesting read.... don't understand what the distribution of fish has got to do with it but if better minds than mine think it has I will try to keep up.

Who are the top Asian bookmakers?