Betfair Soccer World Cup
Do you want to enter the World Cup Datathon but not sure where to start?
- FIFA Women's World Cup Australia/New Zealand 2023™.
- Betfair's API can be easily traversed in R. It allows you to retrieve market information, create/cancel bets and manage your account. Here's a collection of easy to follow API tutorials in R: Accessing the API using R. Get Worldcup Odds. AFL Odds PulleR Tutorial.
Get the latest ⚽ Football Tips & Predictions from Betfair experts and claim today's football betting offer. Top Football Tips Football Previews Daily Predictions.
Our Data Science team are sharing some resources to give you a head start.
Using the popular ELOmethod, they’ve created a set of ratings based on previous World Cups.
In THIS ATTACHMENT you’ll see two zipped files (download / unzip / open with R).
The simple ELO file uses international matches from the 2010 World Cup, through to 2014. It creates a set of team ratings, based on those results, and plots them against the 2014 World Cup.
Following on from that, it uses the same method to ELO rank teams before the 2018 World Cup. The MakeIELO model will be a live submission that you’ll see on the 2018 Datathon leaderboard. We recommend you take a look at each R file and see how you can customise them for your own submissions.
For a better understanding of how the Data Science team have created the ELO ratings, please continue reading.
ELO
- The elo model is continually adjusting a team’s rating
- Before a team plays any match they start with a score of 1500
- After each match a team plays their score is updated by the result (win or loss) and the strength of the team they were playing
- In essence you’re penalized more for losing to bad teams and rewarded more for beating good teams (and vice versa)
- Thus each team maintains a continuous rating which is a proxy for how good the team is
- Implicitly in the rating system is probability of victory of a team with ELO score X vs a team with score Y
Our ELO Approach
Betfair Soccer World Cup Qualifiers
- We set every soccer team’s score to 1500 on the first day after the 2010 WC
- We run each game between then and the start of the 2014 WC through this scoring system
- At the end we have a set of ratings for every team including both those the qualified and didn’t qualify for the world cup
- Then when we look at the schedule and we have say Argentina (who might have landed at a score of 1810) vsing Saudi Arabia (who might have landed at an ELO score of 1630) we can calculate Argentina’s probability of victory
Draws
- We needed to overcome the problem that our probability formula for two ELO scores doesn’t naturally support drawed results.
- It will say Argentina will win 72% of the time and Saudi Arabia 28% of the time
- But we know that a draw is more than possible!
- So we calculated the historical draw rates for this scenario
- To be more general we said for teams with a ELO point differential of around 200 (1810 v 1630) these matches drew 22% of the time
- Then we just adjusted the win / loss probabilities equally (11 % each) to allocate probabilities to all possible outcomes
Conclusion
Hopefully you’ve gained some confidence from the article and the two R attachments that Betfair’s Data Science team have shared.
We’ve got one other ELO educational tool on The Hub which may help your understanding: ELO Modeling for Tennis.
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Soccer is responsible for the lion’s share of traffic going through most major online sports betting sites, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that virtually every online bookmaker has prepared an excellent offer for the 2019 World Cup betting.
As 32 national teams are going to try to reach for the most prestigious championship in the soccer world, sportsbooks will be competing for new customers by spicing up their bonuses and odds. As you’ve probably already guessed, this is an excellent opportunity for an active bettor, as comparing the odds between different sites is almost guaranteed to provide you with plenty of opportunities to place profitable sure-bets.
Best World Cup Betting Sites
- LIVE STREAMINGRead ReviewDaily Prop SpecialsRating: Read Review 4.9€300Read Review1000s Daily BetsRating: Read Review 4.6€1000Read ReviewGlobal SportsbookRating: Read Review 4.5
Money Line World Cup Betting
Money lines or 1×2 bets are the most popular type of soccer wagers, so you’re guaranteed to have plenty of markets of this kind to choose from throughout the entire World Cup. When you place a money line bet, you have to put your money on one out of three options: home (1), draw (x) or away (2). The odds for bets of this kind are universally expressed on a $100 basis. The most likely outcomes are always marked with a minus symbol, which means that you’ll have to wager the amount set by the bookmaker for a chance to win $100. The less likely outcomes, for example the underdog winning, are always marked with a plus symbol. This means that you’ll be earning more than you’ve paid if you win the bet, so you have to wager $100 for a shot at winning the amount listed on the site. For example:
Brazil -150
Draw +200
Spain +250
In this case Brazil is the favorite, so if you were to put your money on this team, you’d get $100 for each $150 you put at risk. A draw on the other hand would provide you with a $200 return on every $100 you invested. Finally, if you bet on Spain and your team managed to win the match, you’d get $250 for every $100 you wagered.
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Over/Under World Cup Betting
Over/under bets are yet another excellent way to wager on World Cup games. Unlike money lines, bets of this kind don’t require you to guess the winner of the match – in fact, whether one of the teams wins, loses or draws is completely irrelevant in this case. When you place an over/under bet, your goal is to predict whether the combined score of both teams will be higher or lower than the total posted by the sportsbook. For most games, this total tends to be set at 2.5. In such a case, winning an over bet would require both teams to score at least 3 goals, while winning an under bet would be possible only if the number of goals scored by both teams was equal to 2 or lower.
Parlay World Cup Betting
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Parlays are advanced combination wagers that allow you to link two or more traditional bets like money lines or totals. The most common parlays are called doubles and trebles since they’re composed of two and three bets respectively. Parlay betting is very different from placing each wager separately – the odds offered on parlays are significantly higher, but if any of your predictions are wrong, you lose the entire combination. For example, if you place a two-team parlay and you bet that your team will win the next match and that the total will be higher than 2.5, but your team wins the match 1-0, you won’t be getting any money. All things considered, parlays are best suited for seasoned bettors and high-rollers who enjoy the high-risk, high-reward action that wagers of this kind provide.
Futures Betting
Virtually every die-hard soccer fan has an opinion as to who will actually win the World Cup, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that virtually every sportsbook offers plenty of World Cup futures markets. The odds on bets of this kind are usually very high, but keep in mind that any futures bet is a long-term investment, so you won’t be seeing your money for a while even if your predictions prove to be right. Furthermore, most sites require you to place those wagers before the tournament actually starts. However, if you end up being late, some sites might still allow you to put your money on one of the teams with adjusted (and lower) odds.
Prop Bets
The term “proposition bets” or “props” refers to wagers that don’t really fall into any of the categories listed above. Consequently, props tend to be rather gimmicky and usually deal with the performance of specific players instead of whole teams. Popular props offered by many bookmakers include the first team to score, the first player to score and the total number of goals scored by soccer superstars.