How To Generate Betscope Inputs
If you decide a bet is worth making, you should always know what you think the fair line should be.
Last week, one of our users in our Discord server asked a great question about how to use Betscope, specifically about how to use our interface to reflect their views on how the game will go and find the best bets to reflect those opinions. Their summarized quote:
“Is there, or can you do a demo on how to find value in the NHL? I do not understand how or if I would adjust odds and lines if I have an opinion on a team to win the game outright. Also, how do I adjust something like points or assists if they are set at 1 and I predict over 0.5? Would I not change the stat in that case? I would love to be able to answer that question coherently, with conviction, and of course profitably.”
This is the exact line of thinking Betscope looks to promote for sports bettors looking to uplevel their approach. Most novice sports bettors have erroneous sources of conviction on the bets they want to make (“There’s no way this team can win on the road”, “I can’t see this player living up to the moment”, “This team has a losing ATS record under X conditions”, etc.) that give a false sense of confidence, and inevitably, these bettors struggle to understand why they don’t win as much they think they should. To start to correct this type of thinking, there’s one particular question those bettors should start to be able to answer, even if it’s not necessarily correct:
What should the fair line be?
Having a process to answer this question immediately filters out a lot of leaks and misleading data points out of their approach, whether it’s overweighting narrative, fluky trends, or any other kind of opinions not driven by a more logical approach to sports betting. This question applies to any kind of market you’re betting, whether it’s spreads, totals, or props: what should the fair line be?
If you’re not used to having to answer that question, Betscope can be a little non-intuitive to use. Making bets with a vague indication that you like the bet is one thing; being able to answer what you think the fair value for the bet is coherently, with conviction, and profitably, as the above quote lays out, is a different proposition altogether. And even if you do have the right level of conviction, converting that conviction into the matching set of inputs into Betscope isn’t necessarily intuitive. So we’ll walk through some common approaches for how to answer the fair price question correctly, and how to translate those answers into meaningful Betscope inputs for our correlation and bet calculator tools.
Determining Your Own Line
If you have made a lot of bets previously without asking yourself what you think the fair line should be, this is a habit you can start right away. Even if you don’t have a clear idea of what the true line should be, you can start with a semi-educated guess. Example: for this weekend’s Bengals/Patriots game, the current consensus line is roughly Patriots +3.5. If you think the Bengals make a good bet, presumably you should think the true line is anywhere from Patriots +4.5 to Patriots +10; conversely, if you like the Patriots, you should think the true line is anywhere from Patriots +3 to Patriots -3. Not sure exactly where in the middle you think you should be? Just take a guess! Even going through this line of thinking will have several immediate benefits:
It will help establish clear thresholds at which you will and will not make a bet, insulating you from noisier non-predictive signals like trends.
It will provide you with a more specific number to track over time instead of pure results, which can be influenced by plenty of
It will help quantify how much value you see in a given bet, i.e. whether you think a line is a little off of if it’s way off. Evaluating your bets by these categories can help sharpen your process over time.
Our distribution calculator is a great assistive tool for this process: it lets you convert both odds lines and projections into full distributions, as well as shows you what the equivalent fair market price is for all different values of the line you’re looking to bet. The calculator also will tell you what the average projected value is for your line as well, which can be used for generating Betscope inputs as well. Using the Bengals/Patriots example above, when the consensus line is Patriots +3.5, here’s how that appears in Betscope’s odds screen:
As a reminder, the projected average scoring differential (i.e. the “Spread” box in the upper left) may be slightly different than the actual number value for the line: the spread value from the book odds represents the median outcome, but the projected value represents the mean outcome. (You can read more about why that’s important here.)
Let’s say you like the Patriots, and you guess the real line should be Patriots +1.5 with 50/50 odds on both sides. We can plug that line into our distribution calculator to see what the fair price should be for all other lines, as well as what the projected scoring differential should be for that line:
To recap: if you think the true odds line for this game should be Patriots +1.5, that means that you think the average projected line is Patriots +1.35. You can plug this value into the Betscope page for this game to tell it how you think the game will go overall and click our “Update Stats” button to connect that belief to how you think all the other bets should be different as well:
Betscope will then give you a list of all recommended bets across all of the markets, capitalizing on markets with known weak pricing:
Now, whether or not your belief that Patriots +1.5 was a good belief is a separate question entirely; evaluating that process is at the core of what makes good sports bettors and is an ongoing process for even already successful bettors. That being said, even if you’re just beginning to think more critically about your bets and starting to answer “what should the line be?” more consistently, Betscope can still help you offer a path to immediate profitability:
Attacking correlated markets with weak pricing can still produce a profit, even if the original belief isn’t particularly strong. If you’re able to capitalize on very badly priced lines, often times that will be enough to find profitable bets.
This is the long-winded answer to the original question of “how can I confidently bet into a market with conviction”: you should be able to say exactly at what numbers and what prices you would and would not bet it. If this is new to you, that’s okay: everyone who starts out in sports betting goes through the same process, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get. We’re happy to provide all the tools you need to accelerate that process and become a confident and profitable sports bettor.