As virtually every professional bettor will tell you, playing online football gambling agent backing heavy favourites is a sure fire way to the poorhouse. That’s common knowledge, right? Perhaps, but there is one problem with that type 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 top teams. The bookies without doubt see a flurry of parlays involving clubs like Chelsea, Barcelona and Juventus every weekend. Surely there is value in taking the underdog in these situations, isn’t there?

In reality, numerous studies have shown that blindly backing long shots is a losing proposition in the long term. To see why that’s the case, we have to know how a bookmaker operates. Considering that 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. While this is sometimes the case, and several bookmakers suffer months of huge losses, you can find a number of ways a bookie can protect himself.

It is critical to bear in mind most heavy favourites are combined in parlays involving at least three teams. A bookmaker only needs one loser to take his customer’s money. Therefore, there is 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 will not hurt their bottom line.

In the event 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. Comprehending the concept of theoretical hold will make this clearer.

When building lines, a sportsbook will offer odds on each team that offer it a slight edge, ensuring a profit irrespective of how the game turns out. This is called the Theoretical Hold and is expressed as a share. It represents the combined quantity 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 more generous price and accept a smaller profit margin. Short-priced favourites generally have small margins, 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 doesn’t expect much betting interest in that team.