As an example lets take a look at July and August in the MLB.

If you played every favourite you would have made

July £1.65 profit from 386 £1 bets
August £1.19 profit from 429 £1 bets

A lot will only play home team favourites as well and that would have returned a loss

July -£6.11 profit from 280 £1 bets
August -£1.54 profit from 280 £1 bets

Baseball has got to be one of the most inconsistant sports around and is a sport where value pays as does looking outside the box.

The winner will be the tipster with the most points at the end of the month.

Rules -

1) You must finish in profit to be eligible for the £25 prize
2) You must be a member of this forum
3) You must be able to accept a paypal payment if you are the winner
4) All daily selections must have been made 1 hour prior to the race, any after that time or edited posts will not count towards your total.
5) You do not have to make a selection every and you will not lose any units for not making a pick but you must have made at least 12 selections per month.
6) Non runners are non runner and treated as a no bet for that day.

There are no limits to the number of players, if only 3 people enter then the prize will still be awarded.

See http://ukcapper.proboards104.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=108

We don’t currently list value on our site for football/soccer as we like to leave it down to the punter to ascertain themselves after studying the form the probability of an outcome but we will from this point forward be highlighting value on our blog when a selection recommended as a BET is value for money. 

How can you improve your perception of value? 

Firstly we believe that in order to identify the true odds you really should be handicapping at a level of correct score or at least the winning margin. Once you have capped the correct score you can use basic mathematics as you see fit to identify the home win percentage, draw percentage and away win percentage. 

Let’s work on a very basic example as a starting point. 

As a simple starting point you can work to a basic principle that a draw on average will be around the 3.5 ish mark so that’s 28% ish of a 100% book. This leaves 72% remaining for the home and away odds. 

Let’s say that you have capped a game at 2-1 to the home team. 72% / (2+1) = 24  

Home Team = 24 x 2 = 48 = odds of (1/0.48) =  2.08 Away Team = 1 x 24 = 24 = odds of (1/0.24) = 4.17 Draw Odds = 1 x 28 = 28 = odds of (1/0.28) = 3.57 

You have now a simple idea of understanding basic value for a 100% book.  

Now this will no means be accurate and you need to remember that bookies will not have 100% books so you need to include 2-5% for their books in your calcs if you wish but you are well on the way to improve your betting and profits. 

Of course you need to have a decent handicapping technique in the first place and that is something we will be writing about in next week’s football/soccer blog. 

Feel free to add your views and basic or detailed techniques on identifying odds to ascertain value.