It is no secret to anyone that most players lose their bets. Over the last decade, the profitability of the Against the Crowd strategy, which is to go against the popular opinion of a particular event among other players, has been the subject of heated debate.
It seems obvious that blind betting against the other players will not in any case lead to profitable results. After all, if this method worked flawlessly in every situation, then everyone would use it and win in the long run. Therefore, it is important to consider whether the other players are not betting on one team en masse for any good reason, or simply because "I know the first team and I don’t know the second one, so the first one should win."
Nowadays, players are much more informed than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, the players were mostly based on the opinions of their friends, TV analysts and sports journalists in the newspapers. This way, the crowd easily led in one direction or the other, sometimes without any justification. The amount of information that today's bettors have at a click away is an incomparable advantage to what was available in the past.
Of course, having a lot more information available on the Internet does not mean that many people use it. The majority of players in bookmaker houses bet solely on entertainment, which is ok, of course. They are not so interested in winning or losing, they are simply betting for the pleasure of it. For this reason, however, they do not make the necessary efforts to analyze their forecasts and make them based on generally accepted perceptions or on their previous observations of the teams. Manchester United can't help but win against Southampton, right? Ask 10 of your friends and acquaintances about the match forecast, and everyone will probably tell you that United will win. They do not know what the status of the two teams are, but they know that United is a great team with traditions and many successes in the past, so they assume that it must win. The same logic is based on the stakes of a huge share of clients in bookmaker houses.
What does it mean to bet against the crowd
Betting against the crowd trend is a pretty simple concept: When you bet on one event, no matter the sport, place your bet against the team that everyone else has bet on or at least against the big favorite. Each game has a favorite and an outsider, and most games have a favorite of the crowd and an outsider of the crowd.
Reasons why we should use the method
There are professional studies that show that the method is successful for players in nearly 65% of the time - which is logical, because if the crowd was always right, online bookmakers would lose a lot. The crowd loves cute choices, not rational ones. The crowd always bets on the best teams, creating the false feeling that the best teams have the ability to beat every opponent, every time.
As we explained in the article Why bookmakers’ odds change when most bets are on one side, bookmakers are forced to reduce the crowd favorite odds and increase the crowd outsider in an attempt to balance their accepted odds and thus ensure a safe profit for either way the game develops. This way, by betting against the crowd, you will be able to enjoy better odds than "fair odds", which is sure to be profitable in the long run.
It is also a good strategy to bet against the teams with the most fans in the world. People tend to bet on their favorite teams, even when they know they are in no good shape and are likely to lose. In fact, this is one of the best strategies because these players are betting on their favorite teams for no rational reason and are simply giving you better odds for their opponent. However, it is good to know how many anti-fans this team has, because, as many loving their team are willing to bet on it blindly, many haters would bet dearly against it at any moment.
But, of course, the crowd is not always wrong. Sometimes the majority of the players start to bet big on one team for some reason which changes the odds of both teams / competitor, such as an injury to an important player. Then the odds change again in the downward direction for the newly created crowd favorite, but the new odds are a real reflection of the new options for the way the event would end. This is why it is important to always answer the question of what causes the crowd to go in one direction - objective or subjective.
The question is how to find out what the other players are betting on. There are websites on the internet that provide information about this, and bookmakers such as Bwin and Sportingbet show on their sites data on what people bet on the most on their platforms.
Against the crowd strategy has established itself as profitable over the years. You should definitely try it!
