I write this blog to you, my faithful readers, from the shores of Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine. Lindsay, Mia, and I are taking a few days to rest and relax as the beach volleyball calendar takes a brief pause. If you’ve been watching Bet The Beach Live (Wednesdays 9p ET, 6p PT on YouTube) (cough…shameless plug…cough), you’ve undoubtedly seen our 2006 Airstream trailer, known lovingly as Sweaty Betty III, parked in our driveway, right next to the sand court. We try to get her out as much as possible in the brief but delightful Northeast summers, so this will assuredly not be the last dispatch from Ms. Betty.

With the Beach Pro Tour in the midst of a 4 week summer break, the AVP off until the Manhattan Beach Open mid-August, and the Olympics still 5-1/2 weeks away, I thought it would be a good time to do a slightly deeper, slightly more mathematical look at gambling. I placed my first wager on a beach volleyball match on April 20, only 2 month ago. Since then, I’ve placed 67 bets on 5 different Beach Pro Tour Tournaments. The learning curve has been steep, but there is already one really valuable lesson I’ve focused in on:

“It is critical to understand the direct correlation between the odds given, your win percentage, and your long term rate of return on a gambling investment. Once this relationship is known and understood, it can it be manipulated in your favor as a gambler.”

So I took to Excel to attempt to build a chart that showed Rate of Return (ROR) as a function of the odds and win percentage. With a little (a lot) of help from my beautiful wife and accountant Lindsay, I was able to put together what I believe will be the holy grail of successful beach volleyball gambling. Let’s zoom in a bit and provide an example, for context:

In this example, if one were to place multiple equal bets at an average total odds of -125, and hit on 67.5% of those bets, they would return 121.5% of their initial investment.

I’ve added some additional conditional formatting (colors) to the graph to help illustrate the more and less favorable ROR regions. Anything that returns a negative ROR is highlighted in RED. A negative ROR means we run out of money and have to stop gambling. No fun there.

I chose 100%-115% as my “YELLOW” shaded region. For now, my approach in the yellow region will be to proceed with caution. While technically a favorable (positive ROR) result, I am ever-aware that “The House Always Wins” and am unwilling to underestimate the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is the sports book. The green shaded regions indicates a ROR of 115%-140%, and for now is my targeted ROR region. Blue regions are ROR over 140%.

I went back and plotted every tournament I’ve gambled and roughly where I landed in the above chart for those bets.

Of the five tournaments I’ve gambled on, one (the Xiamen Challenge) put in in a negative ROR position (win percentage of 60% and average odds of -171.) Two put me in the yellow (CAUTION) region, and the most recent two (Espinho and Ostrava), I ended up in the blue region.

A skeptic would get to this point and say to me “You did all that work to prove that it is better to win more of your bets?” This would be a fair point, from a reasonable (boring?) person, that doesn’t understand just how good Bet The Beach can be at picking winners. Kidding. Mostly. I’ve said many times that I’m still in “data collection mode” when it comes to beach volleyball gambling. Do I expect to continue to live deep in the blue region? I do not. Not yet.

What I will do is continue to track win percentage (overall 46-21, 68.66%) and use that number to help chose odds that put me solidly in the green region.

That’s it for me today. Gonna head back out to the lake. See you all Wednesday on YouTube for another episode of Bet The Beach Live!

Chris DeTurk- June 17, 2024