Farshid Broeker

Soccer punters - Who bets and which bias is produced: Characteristics of sports betting Farshid Broeker

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Economics - Micro-economics, grade: 1,3, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, language: English, abstract: The online sports betting markets industry has been gaining in popularity worldwide during the last decade. The Internet gives punters faster access to their bookmaker and lets them easily compare the odds of many different bookmakers. Furthermore, many online gambling sites offer a wide range of different sports events and specialized bets for their customers. Nowadays it is not only possible to bet on the final outcome of a soccer match, but even on the half-time result or the amount of goals scored during the match. The betting exchange betfair makes it possible to bet against a certain outcome, meaning the punter can act as a bookmaker for a chosen event. Betting on outcomes of soccer matches is very interesting with regard to probability theory because it is based on a numerical code: 0 for a draw, 1 if the home team wins and 2 if the home team loses. Therefore many textbooks on combinatorics consider soccer bets to be a prime example for probability theory. H. Matthes and H. Küchenhoff claim that soccer bets are a great example for the so-called subjective probability, which they define as the degree of confidence with which an observer believes in the occurrence of a certain event based on the information he currently has. P(A) would be the maximum amount in EUR that he is willing to risk if he receives exactly EUR 1 on the occurrence of A. For a bookmaker this would mean that his odd for a certain event will not exceed 2 if he believes that the probability of its occurrence is 50%. Hence, odds that are offered by a bookmaker on the occurrence of a certain result reflect his individual estimation regarding the probability of the occurrence of the given result. Of course, bookmakers can be wrong. If it were possible to identify a pattern for their mistakes, this would help in exploiting them. Furtherm