Disclaimer: I am not a betting expert. Please do not take this as financial advice. Do your own research before making any bets.

I did this analysis just for fun, mainly to see if always betting on the favorite would be a good strategy. Honestly, I’m not sure if it has any real value, but I was curious. I have a feeling that it wouldn’t work, since the odds are lower for the favorite, and they don’t win every time.

Betting data

To answer the question, I collected the data for 3 different leagues:

  • English Premier League
  • Spanish La Liga
  • German Bundesliga

The data is containing all the matches from the season 2018/2019 to 2023/2024, overall I have 7278 matches to work with.

Strategy

The strategy is pretty simple. I am betting always on the favorite, the strategy can be defined as follows:

  • If the home team has lower odds, I bet on the home team
  • If the away team has lower odds, I bet on the away team
  • If the odds are the same, I bet on draw

With that said I ran the simulation for all the matches. Overall I betted 4661 times on the home team, 2510 times on the away team and 107 times on draw.

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In our case the cumulative sum of the return on bet is -366.59, which means if we would bet always on the favorite with just 1€, we would end up with -366.59€ loss. This is obviously a losing strategy. There are some periods where the strategy performs better, however in general the trend is negative, and you cannot make money!

Simulate multiple series of betting

I was curious to see how the strategy performs if we try it multiple times, but with always randomly selected games. I ran a simulation 100.000 times always with 100 games. The following histogram shows very well, that the distribution follows a normal distribution with the mean around -5.

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If we apply the emprirical rule of the normal distribution we can say that:

  • 68% of the values are between $-1\sigma$ and $+1\sigma$, in our case between -14.34 and +4.23
  • 95% of the values are between $-2\sigma$ and $+2\sigma$, in our case between -23.62 and +12.52
  • 99.7% of the values are between $-3\sigma$ and $+3\sigma$, in our case between -32.91 and +22.81

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Conclusion

As expected the strategy, betting always on the favorite is a losing strategy. However I was surprised to see how much we lose on average. And If we keep betting, the losses are accumulating. With that said, I would not recommend betting always on the favorite.