Yield in sports betting

A lot of punters in search for a golden mean (especially when they lose at the bookmakers) are more often looking for other solutions that can guarantee profit at the betting shop. Therefore, punters often step aside from their concept of the game, based on the intuition and personal experience, and choose other sources, ranging from free tips, websites with paid tips or the so-called sure bets and fixed matches.

One of these sources would be other punters. These so-called tipsters provide picks for less experienced colleagues. Keeping in mind the fact that professional tipsters do not usually disclose their personal data, we decided to provide the only known form which really represents the punter’s ability to predict sporting events. We are talking about Yield, which perfectly identifies our betting accuracy in simple, percent based form.

All punters both professionals and beginners came across this concept many times. Yield is a percentage calculation of the betting efficiency, depending on the selected bets and odds for the match or bet slip.

The classical definition of Yield:
Yield is the rate of return, relation of the earned / won money to invested money.

EXAMPLE

The profit in the presented simulation amounts to £44.65 (the amount of winnings)
The bets amount to 8 +9 +5 +5 +7 = £34 (the amount of bets)

We put our data into the formula:
(aw - ab) / ab x 100%  

where:
aw - Amount of winnings
ab - Amount of bets

(44.65 - 34) / 34 x 100% = 10.65 / 34 x 100% = 0.31 x 100% = 31%

In the presented simulation table Yield amounts to 31%.

Yield is measured in percentage. It is believed that the higher Yield index is, the better the punter is. Analysing bookmaker websites which provide paid forecasts of the professional tipsters, we can argue that a good punter has Yield of 5 - 15%. And here comes the “hook”, since in order to test this statement we need two dependencies.

The first dependency is connected with the number of bet slips / bets in which Yield is calculated. We cannot say that the punter is efficient if their Yield amounts to 20%, without knowing their history of bets. Yield can be checked after a short period of time, for example after 10 bets Yield can be very high and equal to 27%, and in another case, after 1000 bets it can be equal to 5%. Does that mean that a punter who has 27% Yield is more effective than the one who has 5% Yield? No, it does not. Quite the contrary, Yield fluctuation lowers over the time and with every bet and it may decrease rapidly if we often lose.

The second regularity depends on the time when Yield was obtained. Of course it also complements the number of bets, and analysing the game history of our punters we can illustrate their effectiveness and what influenced their choice of bets. Speaking of the punter with good position, whose Yield index has been quite high for several years, we can say that this punter plays regularly and has no long periods of "fluke wins".