Hi folks,
This is a work I did back in July 2015 and that took me 2 days to complete (yeah I am slow but I had to use
www.oddsportal.com and enter all the bets manually in an Excel sheet).
So I read several times that Pinnacle closing odds are very accurate to real probabilities, and therefore if you manage to beat Pinnacle closing odds, you will win. The issue is that you need to beat them by circa 5% I think.
So here are my findings:For some reason (and since I am a huge tennis fan) I selected only tennis matches on the Over/Under games (for instance Over 22.5 games), and I took a total of 1184 matches ( my eyes were starting to feel sore ).
There is
clearly a correlation between the odds you manage to get at the moment of your bet, the closing odds, and your overall results, it is undeniable. Here are the results:
Out of 1184 rough matches taken at random, sometimes the odds drop and sometimes the odds go up, makes sense.
In the end on average I found a 0.67% downward gap between the opening and closing odds, I think it's not illogical because the average bettor tends to bet more on the "over games" (we see less bettors bet on the under):
With flat stakes of 100 euros:
Opening odds:
-1385 € (ROI -1.17%); closing odds:
-2580 € (ROI -2.18%)
Subsequently I wanted to do the opposite test to my approach that is to see the results if we bet on odds lower than the closing odds (when the odds went up after I placed my bet, which I personally hate
)
So I had to delete random games among those whose odds had dropped so that I ended up with a bigger average spread between opening odds and closing odds.
I ended up with 880 games and an average increase of + 4.21%, which is not good! It means you placed your bet at 2.00 but later on these odds were available at 2.04 (at the start of the match)...
Results on these 880 games with flat stakes of 100 euros:
Opening odds:
-4150 € (
ROI -4.71%); closing odds:
-2986 € (
ROI -3.39%)
Makes perfect sense again, we are in the case of a bad punter who place his bets at the worst time.
In the same way, the case that we all want to see is the good bettor who knows how to place bets before the odds drop.
Same work here from me, I deleted random matches among those whose odds had gone up.
We end up with 880 matches and an average drop of -4.74%!
It's like you bet on odds of 2.00 when the closing Pinnacle odds is circa 1.952.
Results:
Opening odds:
+ 1615 € (ROI 1.84%); closing odds:
-854 € (ROI -1%) For your information, the average odds were 1.93.
Players I selected: all kinds of players really, the big servers, Isner, Karlovic, Raonic, Cilic, clay players Andujar, Sousa, Klizan, etc. (about 50 different players).
In the end a 880 matches sample may seem small but what is interesting here is the trend, in any case it clearly
confirms the articles that you can find on this topic, which state
Pinnacle closing odds is very accurate. Beat this line on a constant basis and you'll win (not easy to do though!)
PS: you also can see that the ROI found is under 2% which means it's just hard to make money on sharp bookmakers such as Pinnacle. Difficult but not impossible... you'll need the experience.