Even though the United States is playing in the 2013 Rugby League World Cup, most people here don’t know about it. Most folks here in the US play rugby union instead of rugby league, and I don’t even know of any league clubs in the US. But they’ve been having a good run. They’ve beaten Cook Islands and Wales (another place where union totally dominates) to reach the quarterfinals.
Next up is Australia. I’ve heard they’re pretty good at rugby league.
Paddy Power has Australia as…wait, are they serious? 1000-1 favorites? Damn, you could put a D-III basketball team up against the current #1 D-I team and get lower odds!
Has there ever been a legitimate sporting match between two players or teams which attracted higher odds than this? I was thinking that if the US somehow managed to win it would be the biggest sports upset of all time, but now I think if it actually happened the word “upset” just wouldn’t be a strong enough descriptor.
I’m not sure how to convert it to odds of winning, but I know it is not uncommon to see spreads in college football games of 60 points when a top 10 team takes on a division II-a cupcake.
The US doesn’t have that sort of oddsmaking. For football and basketball, it’s all about the point spread. Baseball uses a money line, which is fairly complicated, but never comes close to the spreads in the other sports.
I don’t know if anyone actually calculated odds but in the 1964 Olympics, Billy Mills was not even the fastest 10,000 on the US team. Gerry Lindgren was favored to battle for a medal.
Mills faced Ron Clarke, world record holder at 28:15 while Mills had never run under 29 minutes.
Mills passed the 5,000 meter mark just a few seconds off his best time and kept going, finally out-kicking Clarke in the final stretch, setting a new Olympic record and finishing only nine seconds slower than the world record.
In pretty much any long track race, there are usually only 2 or 3 who have a real chance at the win. Moreso in those days than the modern racing style of slow and tactical and then a sprint for the finish.
The way I understand it, no payout is ever greater than 1000 to 1, regardless of the actual odds. At least that’s how Vegas runs it for bets that rely on odds rather than a line or such.
I’ll bet if you walked up to a bookie on Dec 7, 1980 at the halftime of the New Orleans game and asked for odds on the 49ers to win, the guy would lay you 1000 to 1 odds.
Third Test, Headingley 1981 colloquially known as Botham’s Test (though more accurately Willis’s Test), Australia was in so a strong position that bookmakers at the ground offered odds of 500–1 on an England victory.
Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh put on a small wager as a joke. They collected 7,500 pounds when England turned the game around and won.
I don’t know about DK or Bacchus, but for myself that result still burns and a pocket full of readies wwould do bugger all to sooth the pain.
Checking the odds, I see that it’s actually 1-1000 for Australia. In other words, you’d have to bet a thousand dollars to win one dollar if Australia wins. Seems kind of unlikely a lot of people are going to risk that much money for such a small gain.
The odds on the US winning are only 66-1. So people playing the long shot would only win sixty-six dollars for each one they bet if America won.
Clearly, these kind of odds don’t appear often because you very rarely get that kind of skill disparity in high-level sports. Sport is heavily tiered in almost all cases, so that people/teams tend to play others of a not too dissimilar skill level. I guess there may have been some match-ups in tennis where a wild card (so someone not good enough to normally qualify) is drawn against the #1 seed in a grand slam, but even then it’s hard to get to genuine 1000-1 odds because it’s more likely than that for the favourite to get injured, or just have a really bad day coinciding with an exceptional one for the “no-hoper”.
This is less likely to be a factor in team sports, but for similar reasons, big disparities don’t show up as much in team sports because the individual skill level is generally lower. Or to put it another way, the gap between a Premier League football (soccer) team and one that plays several divisions below is not that great in a single game, where the result can be determined by a few chance happenings.
In the English FA Cup, lower league teams often progress much further than you would expect in the competition, and then meet top level teams. But I don’t think you would ever price a particular team as 1000-1 favourites in a 2 horse race.
In terms of in-game odds, that’s different of course. If a golfer is 6 down with 6 to play in match, then you might start getting towards 1000-1. Or a cricket team only needs a handful of runs to win with plenty of wickets and time in hand. I remember reading a few years ago about someone who tried to parlay a small initial stake into a much larger sum by only betting on “sure things” (i.e. bets of 1-1000 or greater), so their risk was very small each time. Of course, so were their winnings, but the idea was to find enough of these bets that over time, compound interest would take effect. I believe they decided at the start not to bet on football (soccer) as it was too random. But they lost their entire stake when a cricket match dramatically swung the other way, against their bet.
I think the conclusion I draw from all this is that 1-1000 on Australia is not a good bet, and those odds have been driven down by people betting on Australia. 66-1 against the US team sounds like much fairer odds, but I’m not tempted. I’d put the true odds at around 200-1. But I’m no expert in either Rugby League or odds-setting.
200-1 for the US might be about right. I’d probably push it further out, maybe 350-1 - in the normal run of things, I cannot see a viable tactic for the USA to use to spring a surprise (unlike in football, you can’t park the bus and hit on the counter attack as effectively, due to the size of the area in which the teams can score in rugby). To be honest, I think if you’re betting on the US team in this match you are actually betting on the likelihood of a virus breaking out in the Australian team hotel the night before the match, or of two of the Australian players getting sent off early in the game, leaving the USA with a two man advantage. These are obviously pretty unlikely occurrences.
On the game and the RL World Cup in general though, I would say that the US team has performed really well in this tournament. I’ve long thought that RL, which is a lot closer to US Football than Rugby Union, would be a good game for the US to pick up, as it requires much less technical acumen (as there are no line outs, scrums are effectively uncontested and there are no technical tackle areas to negotiate) meaning players could adapt from US Football more easily than to Union. The US team deserve their place in the quarter finals and, hopefully, they’ll be able to use this to kick on at international level. In order to really make strides though, players will inevitably have to emigrate and play in Australia or Northern England (or Auckland in New Zealand) to rise to a level where the above odds really start to come down.
I went through a period where I would look at the line scores and I swear I can remember a number of 60+ point spreads, usually involving the University of Houston (when they had Ware and Detmer and were beating up on patsies like Rice and post-death penalty SMU) and Nebraska vs any team from Iowa.
However, the line I was reading (from the Atlanta Journal/Constitution) could have been some local guy for as far as I know.
1000-1 really isn’t all that high. I bet on sports quite often and I recall earlier this year when Oregon played an FCS team, the moneyline was -999999. Meaning that you would have to bet $9,999.99 on Oregon to win $1. Someone mentioned earlier that baseball has a moneyline – all sports have a moneyline, you just hear more about the point spread.
Well, back when Mike Tyson was heavyweight boxing champion, he had several fights in which Vegas simply didn’t take bets, because their oddsmakers calculated that they’d have had to offer insane odds in order to attract any action on Tyson’s opponents.