Question on futures bets

[Bsims]

Before the NFL playoffs started, I took Tampa Bay to win the Super Bowl at 10 to 1 odds. Now I wonder if I would have been better betting Tampa Bay on the money line before each game and rolling original wager plus profits into a money line wager each week.

One can generalize the question about any single elimination tourney. Would you likely be better off taking a money line wager on each event and roll it on, or a futures bet on winning the tourney?

[Ian]

If you think your futures bet was +EV, then the answer to your question is no.

Let's say you somehow unequivocally know that the Bucs should be 8:1 to win the Super Bowl, but you find a line paying 10:1, you have a longterm +EV wager. If instead you just kept bombing the Bucs on the moneyline you will almost certainly run into games/lines where the odds you're getting are -EV. So you end up making bad bets to get to the same place that you would have arrived at by just betting the 10:1 +EV future.

[StackinGreen]

If you think your futures bet was +EV, then the answer to your question is no.

Futures are almost always shit and as such, should be reserved for players taking advantage of crazy public foolishness (which is pretty rare). Bsims is asking the same question I was asking myself regarding this playoffs, where it was very noticeable, more than any other given year, that very high probability scenarios would yield really bad future odds. For example, I liked a Green Bay-Buffalo super bowl from the beginning. Given opponents and home field, Green Bay was clearly the more likely to advance to the SB, and they were getting OK odds. Buffalo was going to play tough teams (Colts, then Tenn/Bal and then most likely at KC) but their future was consistently nowhere near what each game ML was parlayed, as a projected moving ahead (Bsims question). They are a great team but look how close a lot of their games have been, the weather, etc.

Even now, I foresee a +140 ML by the end of this week vs KC and somewhere around that for a GB super bowl matchup if the Bills win. Parlaying +140s renders mid to high +400s (like +480) and the current Bills SB future is about +300. So your price is more likely a price based on this game and a TB matchup, which is just a stupid bet. Since the equivalent would be you putting $100 to win $140 then letting that $240 ride at another +140, you'd make more money on betting the two MLs (+336 vs +300).

[semibluff]

From a purely mathematical perspective there's no way to know whether a specific possible future outcome will be either at larger odds or better value by either betting the outcome as a single futures bet or as a series of individual match-up bets. Depending on how other outcomes turn out it's even possible for the 1 with the largest odds to be lesser value. This is because, (in the Buccaneers example), the futures odds include scenarios where the team doesn't play the best opponents. Since the Buccaneers will play the #1 and #2 seeds on the road and will likely play the Chiefs in the Super Bowl the futures bet will look inferior to betting the series individually. You only get a fair analysis by looking at all the possible outcomes.

If you're determined to bet a specific futures outcome then the best analysis of the 2 system choices will be to compare the total book price of betting all the futures market vs betting all the series. From a purely simplistic model with 14 identical teams where 2 have 1st round byes and all games are at odds of -110 the total book price on the futures market would be 119.083%. Taking best prices available on the Super Bowl before the playoffs started would have been a bit better than that number. Realistically though there were better odds available game by game, (games aren't -110 each side where the book price is highest and odds variation between different books produces a lower book price). If the game odds price was -106 the futures market book price would need to fall to 111.373% to be of equal value. Based on that analysis betting the futures market will produce worse long-term results than betting individual games.

Although 1 strategy looks to be better than the other I wouldn't recommend either approach. @Ian's point in Post #2 is essentially correct. It's better to evaluate all future's outcomes to a 100% book price and only bet an outcome where you are getting a better price than your 0 juice evaluation. Even then you are probably better off betting individual games because the futures price will likely include 1 game where you have a big +ev advantage and another game where there is a small -ve in the odds vs your analysis.

In any case good luck to the Buccaneers.

[Snowball]

It depends on the odds along the way, but this shouldn't be your question.

The reason why you take a future is to bet less and win the same or more for less risk.

[hehfest]

Take TB 10 to 1 for 1k
1k wins 10k if they win super bowl

You can pick games to bet against them and still win on the future too (Washington points for example). How much would you win on the ML for 1k risk against Washington? Almost nothing. If you bet Wash with points you win, TB advances, and you pocketed your risk on the future.

So, you skip to step 2, and bet 1k ML against New Orleans. I don't know recall the odds as I hammered Tb with the points both halves. Let's say they were +140. You have 1400 now plus you won 200 against Washington.
1600. Now, you pocket your risk and you can't lose anything.

Now, you have 1600 against GB. So, let's say another +140. I'm not doing all the Math to be exact. Give yourself 3800 win if they advance.

@5400 going into Super Bowl and you pocketed your 1k risk already (can't lose)

If vs KC they will be what? It was posted forgot. Dog for sure.

If Buffalo, they were a slight fav?

Either way, in this case......I would say you're better off taking TB risking the 1k first game against Wsh on ML. And going that route.
You have to do the Math. If Chicago somehow beat New Orleans, that is how you would get hurt betting game to game a little. And then, if Chicago beat GB after that, you're in trouble in terms of making some money.

Like another poster said, you never really know what can happen; no way to know for sure which is the better way.

[StackinGreen]

I think my Bills example is good here. They were in a similar spot to win particular games but their overall chance was much better to win the SB than is TB. Also, TB's first game makes betting them throughout much worse, especially since likely they won't beat GB and they just beat a divisional team that had beaten them twice.

All in all, Buffalo was the best play of all these teams but still had pretty much shit SB odds from the getgo. Why? Futures bets are always well under reasonable value.

When I have done great on them is when I have 'capped a team to start the playoffs to go all the way, pounded it (even as a #1 or #2 seed) ... and then bet the dog in the super bowl to win both bets when the fav wins but fails to cover. I did that in the NE Philly SB ... thank you Greg Lewis.

[danmam]

I think my Bills example is good here. They were in a similar spot to win particular games but their overall chance was much better to win the SB than is TB. Also, TB's first game makes betting them throughout much worse, especially since likely they won't beat GB and they just beat a divisional team that had beaten them twice.

All in all, Buffalo was the best play of all these teams but still had pretty much shit SB odds from the getgo. Why? Futures bets are always well under reasonable value.

When I have done great on them is when I have 'capped a team to start the playoffs to go all the way, pounded it (even as a #1 or #2 seed) ... and then bet the dog in the super bowl to win both bets when the fav wins but fails to cover. I did that in the NE Philly SB ... thank you Greg Lewis.

I disagree with the bolded statement. Yes, the futures market has a very high hold, and the shortest odds futures are often terrible values. From "The Logic of Sports Betting":

Multiway Markets And Futures Multiway markets are those with more than two options. I’m lumping futures in here also, because futures are usually multiway markets. There are two main features of multiway markets that pull in different directions for how attractive they are. The first feature is that these markets are usually set to hold a substantially higher percentage than a two-way market. While a typical two-way market priced around ‑110 will hold 4 to 4.5%, multiway markets often hold 10% to 30%. That’s a whole lot of hold. So you should never bet into a multiway market, right? End of chapter. No doubt you can see all the words further down the page, so obviously there’s more to it. You’re only really exposed to that big hold percentage if you bet in the dumbest way possible. For example, say you build a bet chooser program that randomly chooses bets from a multiway market with a frequency weighted to the odds of the bet. It chooses the 2‑to‑1 option about a third of the time and the 99‑to‑1 option about 1/100th of the time. That would be very dumb. If you did that, you’d lose that massive hold percentage over time. So don’t do that. I know the random bet chooser thing was your plan going in, so feel free to thank me for warning you away from that minefield. Okay, the hold is bad. But the saving grace is that multiway markets are very hard for sportsbooks to price correctly. Also, there’s usually not really a market maker for these markets that gets copied. You’ve got books putting out their own multiway and futures markets and then moving them on their own action. And that’s where the opportunities come in. Let’s take NCAA Football Championship futures as an example. You’re a sportsbook and you want to offer these to your customers. There are maybe a dozen teams that have a real shot to win. And then another dozen or two that, if everything goes perfect for them, can make the playoff and therefore theoretically could win. You want to offer this market with a 30% hold, which is, you know, a lot. That gives you plenty of margin for error on these prices. From past years you know which teams are popular with your customers, and since college allegiances basically stay the same year after year, you can probably predict reasonably well the action you’re likely to get on these futures. You start with the teams you know will get lots of action, and you make sure they’re priced to give you a healthy edge on all of them. Alabama? How’s +200. Ohio State? +400. Oklahoma? +600. And so on. Okay. Now you’ve got the rest of the teams with a shot to win, but no particular fan base that’s likely to bet them hard. You draw a little distribution curve of percentage winning chances for the remaining teams that sums to give you the hold you want for the market. Let’s say for simplicity you want these percentages to add up to 100%. (Because you’ve already priced the big favorite and popular teams outside of this 100%, adding all the teams’ break-even percentages together at the end will give you well over 100%. This is what gives the book a hold in the market.) You have to distribute this 100% over the remaining one hundred-something teams. Maybe you lump sixty no-hoper teams together, call them The Field, and price them at 4%. Then you draw a curve with the other 96% and distribute it to the rest of the teams. The best team out of this maybe gets 8%, then then next team 7%, then the next team 6%, and a couple 5s and a lot of 4s and 3s and 2s and 1s and add it all up and you’re done. This is simple enough. And it works for the sportsbook, because they know what teams they’re going to get bet, and they’ve made sure they like the prices they’re offering on those teams. But lurking in there are those maybe two dozen teams with an outside shot to win, but that the book really didn’t spend much effort trying to get the price correct for. Maybe they slipped up and accidentally put a 1% on one of those teams. Or even a 0.5%. That might be worth a bet. Or maybe one of the teams the book knows will get a lot of action is way overrated. Like say Oklahoma is a perennial betting favorite, but they’re primed for a down year. You know TCU looks particularly good and is more likely to win that conference. But they got pushed into the back end of the curve and received only a 3% price. Here is the core multiway market idea. The math of the hold makes it impossible to find lots of good bets in one of these markets. But the difficulty in pricing all those options correctly makes it quite likely you can find at least one or two good bets. Then, as the season progresses, it is equally difficult to maintain and reprice this futures market. This is particularly true in a sport like college football where there are so few games and a single week of results has a massive impact on the chances of every team. Say TCU plays a key game in Week 3 of the season and wins handily. Meanwhile, Oklahoma has played easy opponents so far. Because TCU passed a key obstacle already on their path to win the conference (and therefore make the playoffs), theoretically their futures price should go up considerably. But this may escape notice because Oklahoma hasn’t lost yet. Or even if the employees at the sportsbook are savvy to TCU and give them a bump, it’s very difficult for them to keep track of all hundred-plus teams and every single week accurately assess the impact of the last week of results on each team’s championship chances. And then there’s the problem of what to do when someone bets and you need to move a line. Say Oklahoma starts drawing a lot of action at +600. So you move them to +500 then +400 and finally +300. The break-even percentage on them therefore has moved from 14% to 25%. That’s a big move. How do you move the rest of the teams in response? Well, one thing you can do is just not move the rest of the teams. That doesn’t open any new vulnerabilities, but it increases the hold on the market. This solution is easy for the sportsbook, sucks for their customers, and degenerates into absurdity if maintained all season long. By playoff time every team would be ‑300. To keep a reasonable futures market, if you want to add 11% to Oklahoma’s break-even chances, you’ve got to take that 11% from other teams. You have to make some teams cheaper and give them better odds. But which teams to give better odds? It’s tricky to do it “right.” You can’t just subtract the same amount from every other team—that’s too simplistic and if you do it that way, over time you’re guaranteed to start offering some very good bets. To get it right you have to unwind the logic of it. If Oklahoma is more likely to win the championship, that means they’re more likely to win the remaining games on their schedule. So the opposing teams on the schedule are obvious targets for lowering. Other teams in the conference even if not on the schedule are also likely targets. Another target might be a top team in a different conference that might match up poorly against Oklahoma in a theoretical playoff game. That’s starting to get in the weeds, though. The bottom line is that it is not remotely obvious exactly how to distribute these 11% among the remaining teams once you give it to Oklahoma. Sportsbooks can and do make plenty of errors when they do this. Of course the sportsbook doesn’t have to do this perfectly to make money on the futures. They just have to maintain the prices well on the teams most of their customers are betting. The market hold gives them enough cushion on the rest so they won’t get burned badly on a few bad numbers. This same logic applies to nearly every multiway and futures market. The overall hold on the market will be very high. The most popular choices will often be very bad bets. It’s difficult for the sportsbook to keep the odds on all 50+ options correctly priced as the season progresses, or as new information comes in. For the most part they don’t even try because they don’t have to. If they get a few key teams right, they’ll make their money. That means that you can break down these markets logically to find the teams that are likely to be overlooked and underpriced. If you find one or two good (maybe even great) bets, you might be on to something. If think you’ve found 15 good bets, however, you’ve probably done something wrong....Futures markets are a great area to specialize in if it suits you. Let’s say you wanted to attack MLB futures. I would recommend opening many different sportsbook accounts and then comparing the futures pricing on each team in each betting market (MLB Championship, AL/NL Pennant, Division winners, even player award futures like MVP, Cy Young, ROY) between sportsbooks. Find the best prices for each runner across all the sportsbooks you have access to. Then start looking for pricing weaknesses. Did one team just win 10 games in a row? It’s possible one or two sportsbooks on your list didn’t update their futures markets during that run, and you’ll find good bets on that team. Same for the player markets. The players who get off to hot April starts get a lot of press, but say someone goes on a real run after Memorial Day. You might find that player listed at 75‑to‑1 on the MVP market somewhere, while due to the hot streak he’s sitting just off the league leaders in the relevant hitting categories. Follow trade news in July. Teams that are trading for win-now talent at the trade deadline could be underpriced. The great thing about a sport like baseball is there’s always something happening, and sometimes hot streaks fly under the radar, especially after the football hype begins. If you check those futures markets regularly throughout the season and pick off the mistakes, by the end of the season you can have a strong portfolio of futures bets that give you many ways to come out ahead.

For example, GB this year opened as +950 to win the NFC (I got them shortly after the TB trade and draft at over +1200), and +1600 to win the SB (though I got them at +2200 after TB's Brady move). Also have Aaron Rodgers MVP +2200 future. No moneyline rollover can get GB up to +2200 at this point. It's all about finding +EV futures odds, which are more available in-season than pre-season, but the statement all futures odds are -EV I believe is false.

[danmam]

My success story was when GTBets allowed. Bucks were up 2-0 on Raptors 2 years ago, had a decent amount of Bucks championship equity but rolled TOR's next 4 game MLs into each other and through an if-bet or transferred the winnings to their NBA Finals Championship future. Game 3 I wagered $20 on TOR +250, so that $70 when into their +1000 future. Game 3 and 4 were +250 or +255ish for TOR, wagered $20 apiece and rolled the ~$70 winnings into their +1000 futures odds. Game 3 odds were lower but end of the day I had effectively $2600 of Toronto futures equity. As a poor af bettor I wanted to hedge but GSW was -280 to win the series so I waited out game 1, Klay tore his ACL, odds shifted dramatically and was able to get a guaranteed profit of $1400 or so out of it. I know hedging is frowned upon as a long term tactic but given my financial situation I was more than happy to take the guaranteed money. Which brings me to this weekend...lots of TB/GB equity, if either faces KC I have even more equity (from 'pick exact SB matchup' wagers early in the year). Probably need to bet hard on Bills (especially at +3, if Mahomes isn't cleared) to avoid a repeat of last year where I neglected to hedge my +4500 SF SB future . One day when I'm not a poor af grad student I'll let 'er ride but give me a few thousand guaranteed and i'll take that.

[danmam]

But I will echo the sentiment of most posters here -- it's really case-by-case. For a prohibitive favorite (like KC entering the playoffs), both the futures bet and the rollover-moneyline method are likely -EV propositions. The moneyline-rollover method works better for longshots, of course, as well as for tournaments with more rounds like March Madness.

As I think we all intuitively know, preseason short-odds futures are rarely if every +EV propositions (and you can apply this too to series-based postseasons, like NBA, MLB, and NHL). But let's look at KC this season. According to Super Bowl 55 Odds Tracker (sportsbettingdime.com), KC opened at +650 essentially right after winning SB 54. To me, that's a terrible bet, yet with a bye, and closing ML odds of -376 (Pinnacle) vs CLE, and current -159 ML odds vs Buffalo, and based on BetOnline's opening SB lines, if KC wins and faces GB they'd be about -111 ML to win (based on odds of GB +1 -115/KC -1 -105). ML rollover method gives them +293 odds to win the SB, so the preseason futures were the best value you could get on them. Another example of this and how it's impossible to predict beforehand was the Lakers' preseason futures odds entering last season (but instead of game-by-game ML rollovers, rollover series win bets). They opened at +450 but had an unusually easy path through the playoffs (avoiding the Clippers and Bucks, their 2 biggest threats). They were -550 to defeat each of Portland, Houston, and Denver, and -350 to beat the Heat (according to this site). That's +111 using ML rollover method. But on the other hand, GB's preseason future mentioned above cannot be replicated through moneyline rollover method. Futures also have the advantage that they have equity entering the playoffs that you can use as leverage. Again, I know hedging is frowned upon, and betting -EV bets against the team you have the future on lowers your long term profits, but everyone's financial situation is different, and hedging as a tactic is highly dependent on your financial situation at the time.

[StackinGreen]

I disagree with the bolded statement. Yes, the futures market has a very high hold, and the shortest odds futures are often terrible values. From "The Logic of Sports Betting":

For example, GB this year opened as +950 to win the NFC (I got them shortly after the TB trade and draft at over +1200), and +1600 to win the SB (though I got them at +2200 after TB's Brady move). Also have Aaron Rodgers MVP +2200 future. No moneyline rollover can get GB up to +2200 at this point. It's all about finding +EV futures odds, which are more available in-season than pre-season, but the statement all futures odds are -EV I believe is false.

My post was based on the odds at the start of the playoffs. No one ever said "all futures odds"

[StackinGreen]

ML rollover method gives them +293 odds to win the SB, so the preseason futures were the best value you could get on them.

This is a johnny come lately bias. The preseason future was substantially higher risk for obvious reasons; it's not a legit comparison.

Futures also have the advantage that they have equity entering the playoffs that you can use as leverage. Again, I know hedging is frowned upon, and betting -EV bets against the team you have the future on lowers your long term profits, but everyone's financial situation is different, and hedging as a tactic is highly dependent on your financial situation at the time.

I treated this subject earlier, which is (unless life changing money) that you should play it as a hedge/double win/middle, or not play it. I totally agree, my feeling is that futures almost solely should be looked at as equity measures to be manipulated with other plays throughout any given season or playoff scenario.

[semibluff]

Moving this thread out of Think Tank is idiotic.