Odds on the Big Fight

I get a kick out of hearing people talk about subjects that they think they understand, but really don’t get at all.

An example is the upcoming mega-fight between Connor MacGregor and Floyd Mayweather, and the betting odds that Las Vegas is offering.

The odds have nothing whatsoever to do with who the casinos think will win.

When betting first opened regarding the bout, the casinos offered payouts that greatly favoured MacGregor. They put the betting line for him at around +950. That meant that if you bet $100 on him, and he won, you would receive your wager money back along with $950 in winnings.

Mayweather’s odds were -2250. In order to win $100 by betting on him, you would have to lay down $2250.

What this was all about was the casinos attempt to put numbers out there that would attract an equal amount of money to be bet to balance either outcome. They want to gather in enough money so that whoever win, Vegas itself would come away with a fat profit after paying off all the winning bets.

It is all about what they think the betting public will do.

As the actual wagering got going, the casino payouts altered to reflect the betting patterns. The long odds seemed to be attracting too many betters to the MacGregor side of the spreadsheet, and so they cut the payments aimed at his supporters, and toward Mayweather fans to get more money headed that way.

At Ceasars Palace as I write this, MacGregor is at +475 ($100 wins profit of $475) and Mayweather at -650 ($650 bet needed to win profit of $100). Likely they will continue to shift until fight-time tomorrow.

Who would a smart gambler support? Interestingly, the only way to win would be to play the same game as the casinos.

Let’s say that back at the opening, you put $100 on MacGregor for a potential win of $2250, and right now you put $475 down on Mayweather to win $100.

So let’s say Mayweather wins, and you win $100, but you lose $100 by having bet on MacGregor. Maybe MacGregor wins, and you get $2250, but lose the $475 you put down on Mayweather. You either break even, or win. The only difficulty with this strategy is you would have to have known ahead of time what the odds were going to do.

If you had blindly put $100 on MacGregor back then, you could still play this strategy by now betting against him.

I’m sure there are gamblers out there that are doing exactly that. There are only two difficulties with this kind of strategy.

The first is psychological. People get emotionally invested in their decisions of this nature, and deep down think that the goal of gambling is to pick the winner, not to figure out how to lose without loss.

The second is that there is a built-in gap between the two possibilities of payout that the casinos milk.

Let’s say that there was a fight that the Vegas oddsmakers think will be totally even in terms of betting. Do you think that they will set both sides so that every bet will reap an equal return? No way. They would set the odds for both sides at maybe -125 so that a winning bet of $125 would only gain a $100 return. The House always wins.

They set the odds at levels that will not only protect them from any potential loss, but so that they make a bucket of cash. It’s a kind of sucker tax.

Then there are also the games they play to stimulate increased betting activity. These include, but are not limited to, sudden public shifts in the odds, “secret” information about the fighters getting leaked, press conferences, expert opinions, and more.

So why have the odds shifted in the Mayweather/MacGregor fight. Early long-shot bets clearly tilted the scale too heavily in one direction. To slow this, and balance them out, the odds changed to lower the payout to try and shift things more towards Mayweather. The amount that the shift has had to take to do this clearly has been influenced with MacGregor’s public press coverage, and the desperate desire of UFC fans for him to win.

The fact that they haven’t shifted more is mostly due to the overwhelming prevailing opinion that MacGregor has no chance to win, and the effect that this has on “smart-money” betting.

My only real experience of all this was back in 1997. There was a big-event fight that as a boxing fan I knew was an absolute toss-up as to who would win. However, as one fighter was a major ass, and the other the kind of guy everybody wanted to win, the Vegas odds didn’t reflect the balanced nature of the real probabilities. They showed the nice guy as favoured and therefore with less of a payout than the jerk. People were betting on the nice guy, and to balance this the casinos shifted the odds the other way. The odds on the other guy were +150, meaning that a winning bet of $100 on him would be returned with an addition of $150 more. I put $20 down on him, and when he won walked away with my $20 back, along with $30 more.

Haven’t bet again since, as I’ve rarely seen a fight I’ve been confident was that far out of whack. It also helped that I was in Vegas at the time, and betting was both easy and fun. I spent part of my winnings on a souvenir hat from the event.

Also, please note, I did not bet on who I wanted to win the fight, but in regards to what the public in general had made the betting odds do.

It is all a game related to, but certainly not parallel to, a fight.