What is a Draw No Bet?

When betting on regular time soccer outcomes that are catered for by 1X2 odds, bettors often want the option of a more simple two-way market. There are two common choices available for this, Double Chance – combining home & draw or away & draw as the two options (explained in detail here) – or Draw No Bet, which as its name implies, removes the option of a draw from a bet – allowing bettors to bet on either a home or away win. They win if their team wins and get their stake back if the match ends in draw.

In comparison if bettors bet on a straight home or away victory, success is dependent on that outcome alone, if the match ends in draw, they lose. It’s therefore logical that your return from a Draw No Bet (and accordingly, Draw No Bet odds) will be somewhere between straight 1X2 and Double Chance.

Bettors can therefore combine 1X2 odds to work like a Draw No Bet. To do this they need to cover the stake on a home win by their profit on the draw; that way, if the match ends in draw, their net profit will be zero, and that’s effectively what you want to achieve.

Alternatively, Pinnacle Sports offer numerous Asian Handicap lines. As explained here the Asian Handicap +0.5 works exactly as Double Chance, while Asian Handicap 0 is known as “PK”. What Draw No Bet offers that an Asian Handicap doesn’t, is the chance of building extra value into your bet by shopping around.

Example of a draw no bet at Pinnacle Sports

Lets look at an example where you would use a Draw No Bet at Pinnacle Sports. You believe Aston Villa are too strong for Chelsea, and you want to stake £100 on Villa at 7.790 to win, but you want an insurance – your money back – if the match ends in a draw.

Other bookmakers price this bet at 4.90 and 5.50. This means, your stake of £100 would yield a winning profit between £390 and £450.

Do you have to now use other bookmakers, who are offering worse odds? Let’s investigate.

Pinnacle Sports as mentioned offer odds of 7.790 for Villa to win, the draw is priced 4.300, while Chelsea’s win is worth 1.518. Can we use these odds to our advantage?

For the purpose of our example our stake for Villa to win is labeled as S; stake on draw is then (100-S), since we want to bet a total of £100.

If Villa win, you will win (7.790-1)*S on that bet, and you will lose (100-S) on your draw bet; so, your net profit is:

(7.790-1)*S – (100-S), or

7.790*S – 100

If the match ends in a draw, you will win (4.300-1)*(100-S) from that bet – you want that profit to exactly cover your loss on a home win, which is S therefore:

(4.300-1)*(100-S) = S

This equation is relatively easy to solve, which gives us a value for S of £76.744, which is your stake on a Home win. Stake on draw is (100-76.744) = £23.256.

Let’s check our sums; your profit from the draw will be (4.300-1)*23.256 = 76.745, which is just equal to your loss on a home win bet, so you achieved what you wanted: you break even in case of a draw.

Now let’s see what happens if Villa beat Chelsea in this example. You win (7.790-1)*76.744 = £521.092, and you lose £23.256 on the draw; so you net a total of £497.84, which ranges from 9% more than the best industry offer on this market (you remember, £450) to as much as 21% more than rest of the industry. So was it worth the hassle? A 9 to 21% profit increase should be sufficient motivation to calculate the stakes.

From the above example, it’s easy to derive a general rule for the stakes. If you label the total amount of money you want to risk with TOTAL, odds for Home Win with HOME, Away Win with AWAY, and odds for Draw with DRAW, then:

(DRAW – 1) * (TOTAL – S) = S

Which gives you the stake for a home win as:

S = TOTAL * (DRAW – 1) / DRAW

As you can see, stake depends only on odds for the draw, which will facilitate your calculation – it’s the same for both home draw no bet and away draw no bet. But if you want to calculate the effective odds, then you need to include odds for home win and away win.

Remember, odds represent ratio of return and stake. Using the same labels as above, in case of home win, our return is:

HOME * S, or, when we replace S from formula above:

HOME * TOTAL * (DRAW – 1) / DRAW

Therefore,

Decimal Odds = (HOME * TOTAL * (DRAW – 1) / DRAW) / TOTAL

Or, after making up this formula:

Decimal Odds = HOME * (DRAW – 1) / DRAW

Equally, for Away Win Draw No Bet:

Decimal Odds = AWAY * (DRAW – 1) / DRAW

You are now able to quickly calculate Draw No bet stakes and odds from a 1X2 market, allowing you to identify the better value Pinnacle Sports offers compared to other bookmakers, and additionally to employ this calculation across two bookmakers to potentially engineer even better odds than using Pinnacle Sports alone.

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Source: pinnacle.com