First, our usual opening disclaimer:
Gambling on mixed martial arts, like anything else in life, is about assuming risks.
But we have the ability to negate those risks, or at least minimize them, by carefully selecting our plays. It’s about the long haul and not instant success, unless you’re in Vegas for a few days and you have a hole burning in your pocket. If that’s the case, go right ahead and do a 12-teamer and lose your money. You’ll have fun and you won’t win money, but you’ll have the memories.
But if you’re a careful bettor looking to maximize your investment, you know that you can’t just jump in and bet on every single fight. You want to look for your own inefficiencies, where the market odds do not match up with your own. And when you find that opportunity, you jump all over it.
If you’re expecting this guide to tell you who to bet on for every single fight, you’re wasting your time. That will never happen. I’ll give you my own percentage and the market percentage by the odds, and when there is an opportunity where I believe you can make money, I’ll make a recommendation. But when there isn’t, I’ll tell you so; after all, saving your money and not blowing it on flights of fancy is just as important as placing wagers.
With those words of wisdom out of the way, let’s turn our eyes towards UFC 166 and the third fight between the two best heavyweights on the planet.
Much like every other UFC card coming down the pipeline this year, this pay-per-view is stacked from top to bottom. In the following slides, I’ll take a look at each of the main card fights. We’ll examine the market numbers, the odds that are being given to each fighter. I’ll translate those into an easy-to-read percentage for you. And then I’ll give you my own percentage for each fighter, and we’ll see if there are any discrepancies between my numbers and the public numbers.
Here’s a quick guide to the numbers you’ll see on each slide:
Market Percentage: Essentially, these are the odds for each fight, but converted into percentage. The end result is the percent chance that the current odds (listed at the top of each slide) are giving each fighter to win. So, for example, a line of -290 would be the equivalent of the market giving a fighter 69.70 percent chance to win.
A note about market percentages: You’ll notice that they don’t add up to 100 percent. That’s because of the vig, a number built into the odds to ensure that the house gets their take no matter the result. It varies from line to line.
My percentage: The percentage I’m giving each fighter to win.
Inefficiencies: The difference between the Market Percentage and My Percentage. As I’ll explain in the following slides, this is where we find our value.