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As almost every professional bettor will tell you, backing heavy favourites is a sure fire way to the poorhouse. That is common knowledge, right? Perhaps, but there’s one problem with that type of thinking: it’s dead wrong.

The received wisdom is the linesmakers skew their odds on heavy favourites since the public love betting on the best teams. The bookies undoubtedly see a flurry of parlays involving clubs like Chelsea, learn online football gambling Barcelona and Juventus every weekend. Surely there’s value in taking the underdog in these situations, isn’t there?

Actually, numerous research has shown that blindly backing long shots is a losing proposition in the long term. To view why that is the situation, we have to understand how a bookmaker operates. Since the bookies take most of their action on short-priced favourites, it’s often assumed they are exposed to big liabilities if all of the hot teams win. Although this is sometimes the case, and lots of bookmakers suffer months of huge losses, there are actually a few ways a bookie can protect himself.

It’s vital to take into account that most heavy favourites are combined in parlays involving at least three teams. A bookmaker only needs one loser to take his customer’s money. Consequently, there is little need to lower the odds on a “public” team. Many sportsbooks will even inflate the odds of a hot favourite to attract new customers, safe within the knowledge that parlay players won’t hurt their bottom line.

If the favourite’s odds are an accurate reflection of it’s true probability of winning, the bookmaker must make adjustments elsewhere. That usually means offering worse odds on the underdog as well as the draw. Understanding the concept of theoretical hold could make this clearer.

When creating lines, a sportsbook shall offer odds on each team that give it a slight edge, ensuring a profit irrespective of how the game turns out. This really is called the Theoretical Hold and is expressed as a portion. It represents the combined amount of customers’ bets that the bookmaker expects to keep.

It’s called theoretical because in reality a bookmaker rarely has balanced action on all sides. If a bookie takes the majority of his bets on a heavy favourite, he can offer it at a far more generous price and accept a smaller profit margin. Short-priced favourites generally have small margins, but high volumes. Bigger odds mean bigger margins. There’s little incentive for a bookie to offer competitive odds on a big underdog if he doesn’t expect much betting interest in that team.