Discuss Now on our Forum
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms work by repeatedly simulating a sequence of progressive events over and over, and accumulating statistics on final outcomes.
The results show the predicted probability of each team winning the world cup, as well as the best current betting odds as found on oddschecker.com.
The expected value of a bet on a team is:
Expected Profit = ( (ProbabilityOfWin*BetLineOdds) - (ProbabilityOfLoss) ) x bet
Values less than 1.0 are predicted losses.
Note that the team favored to win may not be the "smartest" bet, because the odds for them are so low. You are looking for the "sweet" spots, where odds are higher than predicted chances.
Remember that the concept of expected values tells you about the average payoffs of many such bets. If you bet on a team with a low probability of winning - you're going to lose most of the time - it's just that the payoff will exceed your past losses when you finally win. Intuitively you can think of this program as trying to find the teams with longshot odds, that are likely to perform better than their betting line odds reflect.