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If you are reading this article then it is likely that you know quite a lot about sports arbitrage betting. What you might not realize is that the skills you learn from arbitrage betting are transferable to sports trading and betting.

I have been a sports bettor, trader and arbitrage bettor for a number of years. In the last year with the decrease in matched betting opportunities. I have really increased my volume in sports arbitrage betting.

What I started to realize was that through sports arbitrage I was able to pick up on repeatable patterns in the sports betting markets that I could make a profit from.

Patterns In The Horse Racing Markets

One pattern that I could see constantly emerging was within the horse racing markets. What I started to see was that in certain scenario’s there was a high probability that a horse would shorten in price.

From placing a high number of arbitrage bets on horses. I noticed that certain combinations of jockeys/trainer/course and most importantly timing of money entering the market would result in a profitable trade the majority of the time.

From this, I was able to develop a very low-risk trading strategy around the horse racing markets. Experience from sports arbitrage betting allowed me to view the market as a whole. It showed the correlation between how bookmakers move their prices and how the exchanges react.

Value Betting Opportunities at The Betting Exchanges

Another key piece of information that my increase in sports arbitrage uncovered was that each of the betting exchanges offers different opportunities. For example, there are opportunities with Smarkets which don’t exist with Matchbook. In turn, there are opportunities with Matchbook that don’t exist with Smarkets.

The same can be said about Betfair

In the case of Matchbook and Smarkets, you have exchanges that are largely populated by matched bettors. Due to this, there is always going to be more money pushing in the lay direction of a selection.

If you combine this with the fact that you can get 0% commission with most exchanges outside of Betfair. Then you can see that there are probably some very good value betting opportunities with these exchanges.

Make money from sports arbitrage and develop your sports trading skills at the same time.

One of the criticisms about sports arbitrage is that you lose your soft bookmaker accounts and that arbitrage itself doesn’t take much skill. Meaning that eventually your ability to make money from the sports betting markets vanishes and you have to move on.

In my experience, you can learn a lot about how the sports betting markets function from sports arbitrage betting. Whilst at the same growing your bankroll and developing profitable strategies which you can then use on the betting exchanges or sharper Asian markets.

If you are looking to improve your skills as a sports bettor or sports trader, sports arbitrage might be something that you haven’t considered.

But maybe you should?