Ever since kindergarten, I have been good with only one thing … my maths. I remember my scores going from a 10/10, to 20/20 to a 100/100 all the way through to high school. So a 98/100 in my final tenth grade exam was a huge (self) disappointment. Now I am no John Nash, however numbers do circle around in my head whenever the opportunity arises.
One such light bulb went on in my head when, after Pakistan lost a game, a friend once jokingly said, “yeh to patta hi tha, iss sey to sallay opposition pey paisay hi laga diyay hotay, kemm az kemm kuch khushi to hoye hoti” (Already knew this’d happen, so might as well have put some money on the opposition, atleast would’ve won some money).
What a great idea!
I mean simply brilliant … You put some money on the opposition every time Pakistan plays, and if Pakistan wins you are happy since your team won (and the money lost is really a small token amount), and if Pakistan loses, then your heartache is lesser with the money won on the other team … a total win-win!
This and the talk of match-fixing surrounding the Pakistan team once again (on this ongoing tour of Sri Lanka) had me run a few serious numbers. Let me first run a quick example on tomorrow’s fifth ODI between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I checked out various betting sites on the net and found that the odds are against Pakistan in the forthcoming fifth ODI against Sri Lanka. Pakistan’s win is stacked at 11/10 versus Sri Lankan win at 8/11. For simplification in this post, I have converted all the fractional odds in decimals so the maths is easier for a wider audience to understand. What it means is that Sri Lanka’s odds are 1.72 while Pakistan is at 2.10. For novices, this means that if you are to bet a $100 on the Sri Lankan win, you will win a $72 (plus your original $100 back) if they win and if they lose you lose your $100. Similarly if you bet on Pakistan and if Pakistan wins you get a $210 (including your original $100) and if they lose, you too lose your original $100.
This might raise the question that what if you bet a $100 on each Pakistan and Sri Lanka winning, then whoever wins, you are a sure winner. For a better understanding of how the betting works … firstly, this is not possible on the same site or through the same bookie (or at least using one unique account/identity). And even if you do manage to do that through two different accounts or bookies, here’s what will happen. If Pakistan wins you will win a $210 against the total bets of $200 and if Sri Lanka wins your total is at $172 meaning a net loss of $28. Yes, in case of Pakistan winning one can theoretically place a million dollars bet on each to win a $50,000 net but the big IF is Pakistan winning (else you get to lose two million dollars) and also there are certain limits on each bet so exploiting that remains mostly a theory … in reality, the bookies don’t leave any back-doors open for mathematicians.
Now what I did was that I gathered the historical data for the various betting odds for all past games that Pakistan has played in 2009 so far. Then placed a hypothetical $100 bet on each game that Pakistan has played against a Pakistan win (an outright win by the opposition for simplicity, although in today’s betting world you can place many complex tickets). There were various odds available by different bookies so for being conservative I took the lowest possible offer on the opposition and put it in my table (see below). What I also did was hedged half of my bet against a possible draw in the test matches, so in case of a draw I was able to collect $50 back from the original $100 bet. The odds were available for the warm up games of the World T20 so I placed bets on those as well but left the games against minnows (Netherlands and Ireland) aside.
Here are the results:
Had I bet a $100 against Pakistan in each game so far in 2009, with an initial investment of $200, I’d today have $1,105 in my wallet. That is using the most conservative odds. The maximum I could possibly have made with the most odds in (opposition’s) favour could have been a mammoth $2,355, again from just $200. So yes, a $2,000 investment could’ve yielded $23,550 in six months. Since this was a hypothetical exercise on past games (with results known), I also ran an emotional Pakistani fan’s scenario with a $100 bet for a Pakistan win each time … the end result was a deficit of $420 (no, seriously I did not make up that four twenty no. that is the exact deficit on account) plus of course the initial $100 invested in so a total loss of $520. Now that would be double the pain, losing that much money and also your team being on the losing side. The difference in initial requirement of $100 for bets FOR and $200 needed for bets AGAINST is because Pakistan won the first game of the year.
Now I am not a betting man myself (and in no way I mean to encourage anyone to gamble). But these numbers certainly had my head spinning … the numbers are saying to me that my friend in his innocent joke about betting against Pakistan has in fact truly given a winning formula. You win both ways, either your team does or your wallet does and given Pakistan’s recent success ratio, money in the wallet is any time better over calories from Sidrah’s lemon cakes.
Disclaimer: The author does not approve of gambling of any sort and although the example scenario from the past games does show an extremely profitable trend, there is no guarantee of this formula working in future for either for or against odds.
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