Guide
What is a value bet?
A bet has value when the probability you believe in is higher than the probability the odds imply. It has nothing to do with whether the bet wins.
Turning odds into a probability
Decimal odds convert straight into an implied probability: divide one by the odds. Odds of 2.00 imply 50%. Odds of 1.50 imply 66.7%. Odds of 5.00 imply 20%.
If you think something is 60% likely and the odds imply 50%, that is a ten-point edge. If you think it is 45% and the odds imply 50%, there is no edge and you should pass, however much you like the pick.
The margin nobody mentions
Add up the implied probabilities of every outcome in a market and you will get more than 100%. The excess is the bookmaker's margin, typically four to six percent on a main football market.
That margin is why betting at random loses money slowly and reliably. Beating it requires being right more often than the price assumes, not merely being right.
Why a value bet still loses
A 60% shot loses four times in ten. That is not a failed prediction - that is what 60% means. Judging a single pick by whether it landed tells you almost nothing.
Value is a claim about the long run. It only shows up across hundreds of bets, which is exactly why a public record matters more than any individual result.
How Oddsy shows it
Every published pick carries our model's probability next to the bookmaker's implied probability. The gap between them is the edge, and we show it whether it is positive or negative.
Roughly forty percent of our headline picks carry a positive edge. We publish the rest anyway, because hiding them would make the record meaningless.
See it applied
Every match we have called is published with the model's probability, the market price and the result - including the ones we got wrong.
Browse settled predictions