Profiting From Virtual Sports

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Josh Hughes
King of Casino

Virtual sports are a computer-generated version of real sports.

Bookies run ‘virtual events' on lots of different sports, like football, horse racing and motor racing.

These often run every few minutes, 24 hours a day.

Before each event, the bookie will offer various betting markets on the game.

A random number generator will then decide the outcome of the game, and your bets will either win or lose.

Big House Edge

Like with casino games, the bookmaker has a house edge on virtual sports. This can often be a 10%-25% edge for the bookie.

This ensures they make a profit from these games over time.

This means we should never play virtual sports without an offer.

Profiting From Offers

Regularly bookies run promotions on virtual sports.

Virtual sports bets can’t be layed at a betting exchange, so these offers aren't risk free.

But, they can be treated like low-risk casino offers.

We can calculate the EV, and if the EV is positive, we know that the offer would be profitable on average to complete.

This makes them quite similar in mindset and approach to casino offers. Because we can make money from them, we cover them on Team Casino.

Calculating Expected Value – An Example

We'll calculate the expected value of any virtual sports offers that we post on our Reload Offers Dashboard. But here's an example to give you an idea how this is done.

Skybet run regular Virtual Sports offers, one of which is: ‘Bet £10 on Virtual Sports, Get £5 Free Bet'

Sky publish the RTP of their virtual sports. The highest RTP option is the Football over/under goals market, which is 92.59% RTP.

We can calculate the expected value as follows:

Qualifying Loss = £10 * (0.9259-1) = -£0.74

70% retention of £5 free bet: £3.50

Expected Value = £3.50 – £0.74 = £2.76

The 70% retention of our free bet is an estimate based upon putting our free bet on a high odds selection. Such as a horse in a virtual horse race with odds of over 4.0.

The RTP of Sky horse races decreases as the number of horses increases, so we should look for the races with only 8-9 runners as these will maximise our expected return.

Most of the time we won’t pick the winner, but when we do, we stand to make a nice profit.

Important Considerations

Opt In

These offers usually have an opt in, so make sure to do this before placing any bets.

Breaking Up The Wagering

Many bookies allow the wagering to be split into smaller bets.

For example, for an offer that requires us to bet £20, we might be able to break this up into £1 or £2 bets.

This allows us to reduce our variance significantly and give us a better chance of making a profit.

We'll always state in our instructions whether the wagering needs to be done in one go, or if it can be split up.

What odds should the bets be?

When placing bets with real money, use lower odds bets to reduce variance.

Offers will often have minimum odds, for example on Sky this is 1.5. So for these offers, we'd recommend keeping to odds of between 1.5 and 2.

When using free bets, the EV is higher when we bet on higher odds selections. So, we recommend placing free bets on selections with odds of at least 4.0.

Usually we won’t win with our free bet. But, we will sometimes hit winners and make a nice profit.