Today we’re going to write about a betting strategy that is more popular among American sports than with football, however, it’s been shown to work over the years and therefore can definitely be applied to betting on football. We’re going to be writing about something called ‘contrarian betting’

By its very name you can take a pretty good guess at what contrarian betting is. As you probably already know, contrary mean ‘opposite in nature, direction or meaning’ so, contrarian betting means doing the opposite of what others are doing.

A study was undertaken a few years about looking at contrarian betting in NFL matches, what they found was that in 55% of matches betting on the contrarian view won. Can we use this for football betting then?

We can, but like anything with betting with need some caution. To win long term at betting isn’t easy as we all know, first and foremost we need to bet with value, indeed we need to have a solid understanding of what value is to do that. Thankfully the Bet Dynamo Insights Page let’s use quickly see if there’s value in the betting market. Next then we’d usually need to take a strongly objective look at the two teams playing against each other, looking at their recent form, recent head to head matches, team news and team motivation etc.

What is Contrarian Betting?

Contrarian betting is however, not really based on any of these things and is only based on value and reading the odds. This is what makes it a risky strategy. Instead of piling over data trying to find out as much as you can about the teams involved, here we just look at two factors, where is the value and what are other bettors doing. It’s almost counter intuitive.

But that’s the point of this strategy. It’s widely-known that the vast amount of bettors don’t make money over the long term and indeed they lose. Therefore, many bettors are making the wrong decisions with their wagers and if we already know that then we can use that information and go against what the crowd are predicting.

We need though to be able to read in what direction odds are going though don’t we. Also, we can only use football betting markets where there are two results, for example, Over/Under markets, BTTS: Yes or No, if we use the Win/Draw/Win, or Home/Draw/Away market as some places call it then the market is split across three results and while not impossible to do, of course, it becomes far more difficult to win for obvious reasons.

Contrarian Betting Over/Under 2.5 Goals

Sportsbooks don’t show changes to their odds, but a couple of websites do, for example, oddsportal and a couple of Betting Exchanges do too. Let’s have a look at an example then on Betfair. Normally we’d look at a Premier League match here, but we cannot choose one as this is Friday and when we looked at the Over/Under 2.5 goals market there wasn’t much liquidity (money) in the markets yet. However, an Australian match between Western Sydney Wanderers and Western Union was due to kick off pretty soon and there was around £50,000 liquidity. With so much money in the market then we can say that the market is accurate and the odds shows a true reflection of Over/Under 2.5 goals occurring.

The odds just before kick off are Over 2.5 goals at 1.93 and Under 2.5 goals at 2.04. As you can see from the Bet Dynamo Insights Page image below there’s no value in the Over 2.5 goals market. So, the value would be in opposing Overs and in backing Under 2.5 goals. Of course, you’ll see the prices are different as we don’t use Exchange prices, but prices from sportsbooks.

Anyway, back to Betfair, if we open the Over/Under 2.5 market we’ll see this:

Now look at the wee graph image beside ‘Under’ and ‘Over’, Let’s click on the one beside ‘Under’ and we’ll get this graph.

What does this graph tell us then? Well, we can see that the price on Under 2.5 goals opened at around 2.24 and it has fallen to its current price of 2.02. This means that the market is backing this selection; the price is moving down because the market is backing it. By the contrarian strategy we’d back the opposite and back Over 2.5 goals.

However, in this case we’ve already shown above, thanks to the Bet Dynamo Insights Page, that there’s no value in backing Over 2.5 goals here so we won’t be making a bet on this match. It’s yet another strategy to add to our tool of football betting strategies, but it’s not as easy as just reading odds, we also need to factor in where the value lies otherwise we’re just throwing our money away. However, with the right approach and a critical eye, contrarian betting can certainly be used to find good betting opportunities for betting on football matches.