Translated material
Guess and earn
Analysts and lucky ones can make good money on the totalizer
The manager of the bookmaker, Vladimir gave an interview in the break between the halves of the Brazil Match - Severnaya Korea. The World Cup is the golden time for the bookmaker business, the number of bets increases in the days of the tournament by tens of times. “The great interest in world championship is providing us with good profits,” Vladimir smiles. In the gym of Sportbar, unusually quietly, people at the tables study tables of the coefficients, thinking about the next bet, several people move at the window in which a pretty blonde is ready to take a bet with the next player. By the end of the first week of the championship, according to the President of the National Association of Bookmakers Oleg Zhuravsky, every third Russian believed in the final victory of Spain. 35% of bets are made precisely for such an outcome of the mundial. Every fifth, that is, 20%, believes in Brazil, 5% is in Argentina and Holland. The largest rate was currently made in the UK: £ 17 thousand. Put one of the fans on the fact that England would take the Cup. One of the largest world bookmakers William Hill accepts bets on the victory of England at the rate of 1:14, bookmakers from Blue Square and Stan James - 1: 8.
Justified risk?
The bet on the victory of the Brazil’s national team over Koreans before the match was 1.08 - this means that, having set 1000 rubles, the player would receive at the exit of 1080. “Too low rate, too small a win,” Vladimir comments. But many novice players prefer to put it on the outcome: who will win in this particular match. If football was 100% predictable, the bookmakers quickly went bankrupt, but lovers of light, even if little earnings cannot insure themselves from an unexpected anyone Italians with a paragraph or England from the United States, the lesions of the main favorites of the Spaniards of the Spaniards - from Switzerland or French - from the Mexican national team.
Fans who are confident in the success of the same Brazilians can take a chance by increasing the coefficient: to put on their favorites “with a handicap”. This means that pentacacks should defeat the opponent with a difference of three or more balls. It is on such the outcome of their match with North Korea that many players put, the result is a heavy victory with a score of 2: 1.
* * Lucky, who dared to put it on this final account, could multiply his bet 12 times. For each match of the World Cup, bookmakers offer up to 120 bets. You can try to earn money by guessing what minute the first goal in the game will be scored, it will be scored or with his head, how many yellow cards the judge will show the players, whether the referee will appoint at least one penalty in the match. One of the most popular bets among professional players is Total. The usual "total" match is 2.5. That is, whether there will be more than 2.5 goals or less in the game. “Productive companies use new technologies, creating more and more inconvenient balls for goalkeepers,” says 33-year-old Sergey, for whom the totalizer is the main source of income. - The goal is to increase the effectiveness of games, make football more spectacular. But even the start of this championship showed that the companies failed again: only in five matches from the 18th team they scored three or more balls. More often than all, one or two goals are clogged for the match. ”
In the first match, the Spaniards of the Spaniards were presented by the players of the Switzerland team, who scored the only goal in the game.
It is impossible to predict the result of the game with a probability of 100%, both bookmakers and players interviewed by The New Times are confident. Scientists confirm this thesis. “The science is not able to predict the outcome of the football match, because during the game there is a huge number of random factors that cannot be taken into account in advance,” says Konstantin Sonin, professor of the Russian Economic School (RES), “the fatigue of players, injuries during the game, mistakes of judges, arbitrators or goalkeeper.” “Football is the moment, the case: the referee was mistaken, the striker slipped, the ball got into the post, the goalkeeper took his hand to Inch (2.5 cm) - and all forecasts collapse,” says the famous football journalist and author of “footballonomics” Simon Cooper in an interview with The New Times. So, the bookmakers on the eve of the match of the English team against the American, which took place on June 12, preferred the British team. In the 4th minute of the game, the British already led in the score, but the only mistake of goalkeeper Robert Green, who was unable to fix the ball in his hands after a simple clinth Dampsy, led to a drawing result. “To predict the behavior of one, and even more so twenty-two players, is an impossible task even for political statistics, who can determine the outcome of the presidential and parliamentary elections,” Professor Fuad Aleskerov tells the head of the Higher Mathematics at the GU Economics. - As in football, scientists cannot predict the behavior of one person who can make an illogical or irrational decision, crossing the threshold of the polling station. However, political science, analyzing the behavior of tens of thousands of people who came to the election urns, makes quite true forecasts, because with a large number of observations recorded in ballots for voting, chance in the behavior of individuals are leveled. ”
The theory of games is powerless
Most players, relying, relies on their own intuition, that very chance. More or less professional players are engaged in their own analytics. Sergey spends 2-3 hours a day to score the latest results of the championships of interest to him: “I hardly put on football: the games are rare, the money is slowly turning around. And if we are talking about the mundial, you have to rely solely for luck: the tournament is too short to collect sufficient statistics for analytics. ” For several years, he has been tracking the matches of all teams of the US baseball league, basketball NBA and Hockey NHL, trying to track some laws. In the baseball Major League Baseball, 30 teams play, and by the middle of the tournament, Sergei is already roughly representing: whether this or that team of the Russian Academy of Sciences (point) will work in the first inning (one of the 9 segments of the game) or not. Without failures, of course, it does not do here: then the player can start playing “for the catch”. “You put it on the team, and she lost. In the next match, you put on it the most important amount based on the calculation that you need to cover the loss and stay in the plus, ”Sergey paints. - But the team can lose two, three, and four times in a row. Once, in this way, I “catch up” with the NHL team “Florida Panters”. He sank then for about half a million rubles. ” He recalls how his familiar businessman, the owner of a furniture company, tried for 13 matches to “catch up” the baseball team “Houston Astros” that had fallen into the black lane and eventually lost his business. “After that, I decided that it was better to make five correct bets of 50 thousand rubles a month than playing daily,” Sergey summarizes. "
Irish Raddy Rower, openly stated
at one time that he is afraid to work with Russia
Due to the opacity of the country's financial system
"Players specializing in football try to choose the criteria of the game that are statistical analysis: for example, they make bets only on the number of corners in the match or on the number of yellow cards shown in it." To play on cards, it is necessary to analyze the actions of the whole team, but the actions of the judge, which is easier,-explains the Igor who makes up the last five years. He whistled for a specific foul, gave a card, most likely in the next match, he will not change the interpretation of the rules in this regard. ” The probability of the onset of an event, for example, is possible to determine the circle of national teams that have the greatest and smallest chances of passing the qualifying stage, ”says Konstantin Sonin from Rash. Thus, a professor of statistics at the University of California in Berkeley David Brillinger developed a mathematical model, which described in the language of “one of the world's outstanding world championships in the history of the head of the head”, clogged into the gates of the Serbia and Montenegro national team in 2006 by the Argentines. The peculiarity of the goal was that within one and a half minutes 8 Argentinean football players made 25 passes, which led to an effective outcome of a complex combination: “Using a computer and this model, we can teach football players strategic behavior, tactics and even intuition,” summarizes the author of the model in the article of a scientific journal, completely dedicated to the mathematical analysis of sports competitions. * * Brillinger D. 2007. A Potential Function Approach to the Flow of Play in Soccer. Journal of Quantitate Analysis in Sports. 3 (1): 1–19. In addition to mathematical modeling, scientists use the apparatus of games theory that studies the strategic behavior of people: “The theory of games allows you to predict the behavior of players and teach them strategic behavior in certain situations, for example, during a penalty,” explains Konstantin Sonin. “There are no equilibrium in pure strategies, that is, situations in which both sides are obviously benefit from interaction with each other: if the football player hits the goal, and the goalkeeper does not beat off the ball, then one side wins, and the other loses.” The results of the analysis of almost 1900 successfully clogged penalties during the World Championships and matches of the UEFA Champions League say that in 44% of cases the goalkeeper rushes at the ball to the left, in 43% of cases - to the right and 13% - remains in the center. At the same time, 37% of successful blows of football players fall on the left side of the gate, 34% - on the right and the remaining 29% - to the center.
His Majesty is a case
You can tear a large winning absolutely accidentally: none of the specialists could predict the victory of the Danes on the eve of Euro-92 or the triumph of the Greeks at the 2004 European championship. “In our office, one fan put 100 thousand rubles for the victory of Rubin in a guest match with Barcelona,” recalls the manager of the bookmaker Vladimir. - The coefficient for that game was 1:16 ... He had a good evening (Rubin then won. - The New Times), we are not very good. "
The history of games knows examples when random lucky people or successful analysts managed to bankrupt bookmakers. But such stories are single. Bookmakers know many ways to save and make their business successful. The coefficients for the game form the so -called line: all possible rates for one match. Already in these coefficients, margin is laid - the initial profit of the Newsmaker. “The following coefficients are exhibited for the match of Slovenia: 3.65 for the victory of the Slovenes, 3.25 - by a draw, 2.05 - the Triumph of the United States,” says Vladimir. - Suppose you want to earn 1000 rubles in this match. Divide 1000 into each of these indicators. It turns out that you need to put either 273 rubles 97 kopecks, or 307.69, or 487.80. Now we add these three amounts, it turns out 1069 rubles 46 kopecks. These almost 70 rubles are our original income. ” According to bookmakers, when this business in Russia only developed, the margin could be up to 25%, respectively, the coefficients were the players as unfinished as possible. Then, in the struggle for clientele, the offices were forced to improve the coefficients, and now the initial profit is laid at 7-10%. But this is a lot. The coefficients offered by European bookmakers for their customers are much more profitable, but large world bookmaker networks are in no hurry to enter the Russian market. The British network Stan James tried to start a business in Russia and developed it until in 2009 the law “On State Regulation of the Organization and Conducting Gambling” entered into force. Then the bookmakers lost their licenses overnight and even a year later, far from everyone managed to regain them. Among those who could not continue legal activities, and Stan James, and the largest Marathon network in the post -Soviet space, which until better times transferred their activities to the Internet. The world's network is a way out for some fans of gambling, but foreign bookmakers often strictly limit the size of virtual bets, and one of the largest world networks, the Irish Raddy Rower, openly stated that she was afraid to work with Russia due to the opacity of the country's financial system and requires banking confirmation of each rate. So most lovers have to play within the country than bookmakers enjoy using. You put money on the same coefficients, the owners of the offices rearrange it in the West in more profitable, and put the difference in their pocket. Finally, the bookmaker can simply stop taking bets on some event if he suspects that it can turn into significant losses for him. “Mountedly we accept large amounts for the matches of the World Cup leading European club competitions,” says Bookmaker Vladimir. - That is, for those events whose corruption background is minimal. This, unfortunately, does not apply to the Russian championship, especially its first and last rounds. Scandals are memorable to everyone, when the bookmakers simply refused to accept bets on the matches of the Grozny Terek, suspecting that when determining the final result, the main role will not play at all a sports factor. ” The average rate, according to Vladimir, is about 10 thousand rubles (the minimum that the player can put - 500 rubles). Large rates - 100, 200, 500 thousand rubles.
Forward Cat-D'Ivoir Didier Drogba managed to run away from the Portugan Pedro Mendes, but the goal did not work-a draw 0: 0
On a global scale, this is a penny. By the beginning of 2009, according to the National Association of Bookmakers, the annual turnover of this business in Russia was approaching $ 2 billion. After the adoption of the Law on State Regulation, this indicator fell strongly and will not soon return to the previous level. The Federal Tax Service has currently issued only 14 licenses to bookmakers, and in early 2009 the market shared 26 companies among themselves. For comparison: the turnover of the bookmaker in the UK exceeds $ 10 billion, in Italy - $ 13 billion. According to FIFA, in 2009 the annual volume of transactions made on the totalizator around the world exceeded € 100 billion. This year, thanks to the World Cup, the amount will most likely increase. And who knows, maybe, putting on Cameroon in his next match with Holland, it is you who will break the prize jackpot.
The preparation of the material took part
Dmitry Krylov and Alexander Mityaev