As nearly all professional bettor will tell you, backing heavy favourites is a sure fire way to the poorhouse. That’s common knowledge, right? Perhaps, but there is one problem with that sort of thinking: it’s dead wrong.

The received wisdom is the linesmakers skew their odds on heavy favourites because the public love betting on the best teams. The bookies undoubtedly see a flurry of parlays involving clubs like Chelsea, Barcelona and Juventus every weekend. Surely there’s value in taking the underdog in these situations, is not there?

In fact, numerous studies have shown that blindly backing long shots is a losing proposition in the long-term. To find out why that is the case, we have to know how a bookmaker operates. Since the bookies take most of their action on short-priced favourites, it’s often assumed they can be exposed to big liabilities if all of the hot teams win. Although this is sometimes the situation, and many bookmakers suffer months of huge losses, you will find several ways a bookie can protect himself.

It is critical to keep in mind that most heavy favourites are combined in parlays involving at least three teams. A bookmaker only needs one loser to take his customer’s money. As a result, there’s little need to lower the odds on a « public » team. Many sportsbooks will even inflate the odds of a hot favourite to attract new customers, safe within the knowledge that parlay players won’t hurt their bottom line.

If the favourite’s odds are an accurate reflection of it’s true probability of winning, the bookmaker must make adjustments elsewhere. That usually means offering worse odds on the underdog as well as the draw. Understanding the concept of theoretical hold could make this clearer.

When designing lines, a sportsbook will offer odds on each team that offer it a slight edge, ensuring a profit no matter how the game turns out. This is called the Theoretical Hold and is expressed as a share. It represents the combined amount of customers’ bets that the bookmaker expects to keep.

It’s called theoretical because in reality a bookmaker rarely has balanced action on all sides. If a bookie takes the majority of his bets on a heavy favourite, he can offer it at a far more generous price and accept a smaller profit margin. Short-priced favourites generally have small margins, Tupalo site but high volumes. Bigger odds mean bigger margins. There’s little incentive for a bookie to offer competitive odds on a big underdog if he will not expect much betting interest in that team.