What Are Even Odds In Betting
Total goals (odd/even) betting type is kind of confusing to some people.guest so many of us did odd and even number at school.odd number simply means those number that when you try to divide by 2, will not give you a common number instead it will give you a number that has dot.that is when you try to divide 3 by 2, it will give you 1.5, which is an odd number.on the other hand, even number is.
Betting markets used to favor Biden over Trump. But in the days after the Democratic and Republican conventions, the markets now report 50-50 odds, a toss-up. Is that a realistic assessment?
- Negative Figures (-): The odds indicate how much must be bet to win $100 profit. Ex: American odds of -120 would win $100 on a $120 bet. Decimals quote the potential return should the bet succeed, relative to the stake. If $10 is bet at odds of 4, the total returned is $40 ($10 x 4) and the potential profit is $30 ($10 x 4 minus.
- A series of calculators to help a sports bettor convert odds, size bets correctly or evaluate winrate.
- Betting only on odds reaching 2.00 or even higher and trying to at least double your stake. Evens betting (encoded as 1/1 at British-style odds, 2.00 at European-style odds, or EVS) is becoming really popular among professional punters, as they are generally.
- You need to wait until the 3rd match of the season and then choose a team that have finished all their matches with an odd number of goals in the first 3 matches. You bet even on that team. If the game doesn’t end even you raise your stakes by 2.2 for the next game and bet even again. If this doesn’t work, raise it to 4.84 and so on.
Based on polling metrics alone, the data so far don’t support this shift. It seems that bettors are factoring in “pre-poll” possibilities such as difficulties in voter access in a way that helps Trump; or “post-poll” disruption such as post-election unrest arising from a slow count, eventually leading to an Electoral College outcome that doesn’t match true state-by-state voter intent. We must do everything we can to guard against these threats to democracy.
But today, let me put that aside. Ignoring the factors above, what would it take for conditions to suggest a true even-odds Presidential election, assuming the election is held without major incident? Based on polls only, here are some thresholds to watch for:
- Biden Meta-Margin at 0.0%
- Biden ahead in national popular vote by 2.5%
- Democrats lead generic Congressional ballot by 3%
- Trump job approval at 46-47%
Here is why.
The Meta-Margin is self-explanatory. As we’ve calculated here at PEC since 2008, the Meta-Margin is defined as what across-the-board polling shift would be needed to create a perfect toss-up between the Democratic and Republican candidates based on all available state polls. Currently the Meta-Margin is Biden +5.1%. (For comparison, Clinton had +2% on Election Eve, and this was off by about 3% based on real election results).
The popular vote requires a little explanation. It is well-known that the Electoral College doesn’t always give the Presidency to the popular-vote winner. In elections where the popular vote margin is less than 3% of votes cast, it fails to do so about 1 in 3 times (for a history of how this almost-popular-vote system came about, see our recent law article). In 2016 it favored the Republicans; in 2004 it favored Democrats (though they still lost). Who does it favor this year?
What Are Even Odds In Betting
Comparing national polls and the state-poll Meta-Margin, it looks like the Electoral College currently favors Republicans by 2 or 3 percentage points:
What Are Even Odds In Betting Poker
This is a plot of our Meta-Margin for the 1st of the month from March until now (the last data point, August 30) plotted against the FiveThirtyEight average for Biden-vs-Trump in national polls. The median difference is 2.4 percentage points; that offset is indicated by the red diagonal line. In other words, if Biden leads Trump by 2.4 points in national polls, the Electoral College is likely to be close to a toss-up.
As of September 1, with 8 post-RNC surveys, Biden is up by 7.1 points, about one point smaller than it’s been for most of June through August. His peak was a lead of 9.3 points right between the Democratic and Republican conventions. That 2-point range is amazingly narrow. I wonder if we’re in some kind of heat death of modern politics.
By the same token, the generic Congressional ballot would need to be at around the same threshold, since people have a strong tendency these days to vote the same way up and down ballot. Currently the generic Congressional ballot is at D+9.8%. Republicans have a structural advantage in the House of Representatives from population clustering and partisan gerrymandering that amounts, coincidentally, to 3 points. So Democrats are currently about 7 points above threshold to keep control of the House (that’s why the graph says D+6.8%).
Finally, we come to the Presidential approval rating. As Kyle Kondik pointed out, an incumbent President’s popular-vote share is typically 0 to 3 points above his approval rating at the time of the election. If we assume that 2 percent of the vote will go to minor candidates, Trump needs an approval rating of about 45% to enter the edge of the range of losing the popular vote, Trump 48% to Biden 50%, a margin that would correspond to a toss-up in the Electoral College. The more likely range for such an outcome is approval of 46-47%. Trump is currently at 43.3%.
Betting Odds Explained
In short, the indicators don’t seem to reflect what the markets are saying. Either the markets are being emotional in some way, or they are factoring in the possibility of extra-democratic events.
If you want to help, the banner above lists the “Moneyball” states where citizen effort has the most leverage in getting to 270 electoral votes – for either candidate. Leverage is measured in terms of per-voter power. For the Presidency the banner currently lists “AK AR GA.” Therefore the most effective places to get out the vote, phone-bank, register new voters – or secure an honest election – are Alaska, Arkansas, and Georgia.