Betting – Exploiting the patriotic bias

Quite often in sports betting there will be a surge of patriotic support that drives the price down lower than what it actually should be. This tends to happen frequently in England for two very important reasons. Firstly as a nation we really love to gamble, we can gamble on anything from Horse Racing to the National Lottery…..you name it and we gamble on it.

Secondly us English are a patriotic bunch, in fact this is so prominent that it often leads to a wave of support when it comes to backing British competitors in high profile events. This can often lead the home team or person being far shorter in price and so short that the only available value lays in opposing them.

One big example came when Ricky Hatton fought Floyd Mayweather towards the end of 2007. The difference between Hatton’s price in the UK and his price with the US sports book and other global betting firms was substantial. This was a clear indication that the global market didn’t rate Hatton’s chances as much as what we did and their prices were based on cold calculation rather than blind patriotic fervour.

As the fight materialised then Hatton performed more in tune with the prices around the world than he did with his prices in England and on the betting exchanges. It was a similar situation recently when Hatton fought Manny Pacquiao. In both of these fights, Hatton’s price didn’t really reflect his true chances when you looked at the prices with the mainstream English bookies.

But when large volumes of money come in supporting Hatton then the betting firms have to adjust their lines accordingly to reflect the level of risk. It is a similar situation with regards the England football team. My first bet in support of this argument came a few years ago when England played Australia at home in a friendly when Sven Goran Eriksson was in charge.

Sven had a reputation for dramatically altering the side at half-time in games that had little importance. When you factored in that Australia had several world class players and that they would love to beat the English then the price for an England victory looked amazingly low. Australia went on to win that match 3-1 and guess who was betting on the Aussies?

Another striking example came this year at Wimbledon when Andy Murray was playing Andy Roddick in the semi-finals. For nearly two weeks in England there had been almost an air of expectation that Murray would automatically meet Roger Federer in the final after Rafael Nadal had pulled out of the tournament. But anyone that closely followed sport could see that Roddick was a changed player.

His new coach Larry Stefanki was working wonders with his game and it was clear that Roddick was now playing on a level that was certainly on a par with that of Murray and as we saw in the final, he was up there with Federer.

But yet numerous betting firms in the UK had Murray at big odds on against a player who was playing on his level who also didn’t have the added pressure of trying to end the run of English home ground players not winning Wimbledon since Fred Perry in the thirties. Quite often you will be able to spot and then exploit these home biases where prices of English competitors have been backed down mainly due to hype to a totally unrealistic price. The value then comes with opposing them, this may seem a tad unpatriotic…..but it’s usually where the value is.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson