I'm not a huge World Cup bettor...much prefer smaller Cups like the erstwhile Johnstone Paint Pot, or smaller, less-trod-upon leagues like the Netherlands Jupiler or Italy Series B.
Explaining why requires explaining a little about my approach. I wrote a book about it and signed with an agent last summer, and he's currently circulating it among publishing houses...anyway, fingers crossed.
My belief is that because closing odds incorporate everything that is known about a match in question — and because bettors' biases are vast in breadth and depth — you can look at the existing record of matches played by the same squad, or within the same league, within a general range of odds, and know where value lies.
I went down this road because of the poor odds offered on many double-chance bets. I was treading water! But it occurred to me that there must be leagues where underdogs outperform the odds of winning outright or of drawing matches against favored sides.
I'll give you an example. You'd expect draws to predominate in low-scoring leagues, and when I created a spreadsheet of results in Cyprus, I found that, in fact, big underdogs do take points from the top sides with some frequency. When I looked deeper into the data, I discovered that the lion's share were the work of one underperforming top side: APOEL FC. They're the most storied football club in Cyprus. In their history, they’ve won 28 national championships, 21 cups and 13 super cups. Some seasons are better than others, yes, but during the 10 years since I started tracking the league, they were all good. APOEL won seven consecutive league titles during those 10 years. But here’s something that’s also true about APOEL: They win the league by dominating lesser teams, while their fiercest rivals take a point from them an absurd amount of the time.
When APOEL are favored at home, but not overwhelmingly — this means they’re hosting other storied clubs or recent title winners, such as Omonia, Apollon, Anorthosis or AEK — they get held to a draw half the time. These are matches in which APOEL are priced roughly between 1.60 and 1.98 and the visitors are priced up to 4.99, meaning the draw is priced anywhere from 3.30 to 3.70. During this decade of dominance, APOEL have won 17 matches at home in that range of odds, and lost 3 — and drawn 19.
Assume your unit is $25: You lost 20 times betting the draw when APOEL were home against a key rival. Against that loss of $500, you won 19 times at odds of around 3.50: plus-$1,187.50.
Now, a World Cup doesn't offer a whole ton of data to sift through. Are there overall tendencies? Yes. The first group games see underdogs get more draws against better opponents, whereas the third group games see more outright wins by underdogs? Why? Primarily because the betting market lumps on favorites in general, and in late-round matches specifically, because odds widen as bettors make silly determinations of which sides "have nothing to play for" and which "must win" to improve their position in the knockout rounds. You see this every Cup, like clockwork.
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