^{Introduction:}

Knowing how to establish a win probability in sports betting is important. It is important because it gives you a realistic look at your chances of winning a particular bet.

In this post, we’ll go over how to establish a win probability by using team scoring, both offense and defense in order for us to get an estimated score. In addition to this, we will also learn how to then use this information to get an estimated win probability.

How to establish a win probability in sports betting.

For this example, I have chosen Football as the sport.

Gather data

In order for us to begin, we first need to know what sport we’re trying to predict a win probability for. In this case, we’ll use American Football as our example sport.
A good website to gather you data from for football is PRO FOOTBALL REFERENCE. They have all the stats you need.

We want to get the number of points scored and allowed per game for each team.

TEAM A (PF 28) (PA 14) TEAM B (PF 20) (PA 34)

After that we’re going to attempt to figure out the average points between TEAM A’s offense (PF) and TEAM B’s defense (PA). To do this, we take TEAM A’s (PF) 28, and TEAM B’s (PA) 34 add them together, then divide them by 2.

The formula should look like this:

TEAM A (28 + 34) / 2 = 31 TEAM B (20 + 14) / 2 = 17

ESTIMATED SCORE

TEAM A 31 TEAM B 17

Now that we have established our estimated score, we’re now ready to convert this into a win probability. Then we can then use this win probability and compare it to the bookie’s. To do this, we divide TEAM A’s estimated points by the total number of points in the game. 31+17= 48

31 / (31 + 17) = 64.59% 17 / (17 + 31) = 35.41%
TEAM A TEAM B

Closing:

In conclusion, we have just established an estimated win probability for a football game. We can now compare our estimate to what the bookie is offering to see if our chances of winning are greater or less than what he’s offering.

But before we place our bets, we must convert the line (odds) into a break-even percentage, and then to an implied win probability. Learn how to do this in our How to convert Line Odds into break-even percentage, and How to convert Line Odds into an implied win Probability.