Understanding the Settings in Oddsportal

My Bookmakers Tab

The third tab along in Oddsportal’s ‘Settings’ is the “My Bookmakers” tab. Upon opening it you will find first the list of compulsory bookmakers that cannot be removed. They are all ticked and fixed. These fluctuate in number and we have seen anything between 16 and 20 down the years.

The screenshot below shows the additional 20 or so that we add to the list. Ignore the lists of foreign bookmakers below this main heading (we leave them all unchecked), unless you have some regional interest in any one or more of them:

Oddsportal My Bookmakers Tab Screenshot

Whenever we provide audited, close-of-market highest odds in any of our HDAFU or Cluster Table simulations, our guidelines are the bookmakers we have checked in the above illustration plus Oddsportal’s compulsory list.

We are occasionally asked, “Why these particular ones?” The simple answer is that in our experience over many years these are the bookmakers most aggressively seeking market share by perennially or occasionally offering the highest odds for one or other of the 1X2 bet types.

Checking Cluster Table & HDAFU Table Bet Candidates

Having worked out your systems, you need to check on the day of placing your bet whether matches offer value or fall into your quotient categories.

At present, in our Summer League HDAFU and Cluster Tables for the 2020 season currently on sale, eight of the 10 leagues use Pinnacle odds at the close of the ante-post market, which makes it easy for you to check bet candidates on the day – in other words, just check whatever odds Pinnacle is offering.

These leagues are Brazil; China; Ireland; Finland; Japan; Norway; Sweden; U.S.A.

Only Iceland and South Korea still utilise audited highest odds at the close of the ante-post market captured from the range of Oddsportal compulsory and chosen bookmakers listed above – in these cases, you will need to check the timestamps of the bookmakers in our list to establish what the highest correct 1X2 odds are at the time.

And you should also note that beginning with the 2020-21 Winter League seasons in Europe’s main leagues, it is anticipated that the majority of all HDAFU and Cluster Tables will rely on Pinnacle odds only (at the close of the ante post market).

Low Margin Bookmakers

The bookmakers which appear to us most often to offer the best attainable odds are:

a) From Oddsportal’s compulsory list (in alphabetical order):

• 10Bet
• Asianodds
• Bet365
• Pinnacle

(N.B. Asian Odds is a pool or ‘aggregator’ of different bookmakers, including access to Pinnacle for those geographically restricted from doing so directly. Its odds are very, very rarely any higher than Pinnacle’s at the same point in time – it seems to be led by whatever Pinnacle is offering).

b) From Soccerwidow’s selected list

• 12bet/Dafabet (the same group of companies, but we keep both in our list as different time stamps can appear against both)
• 188bet
• BetVictor
• ComeOn!
• Oddsring
• SBOBET

These a) and b) lists represent approximately a third of the 36/37 total number of bookmakers we recommend looking at when checking or scraping odds. But please remember that not all of these bookmakers participate in every league, and the others listed do occasionally come up with best odds on the games they do wish to target for market share.

Problem Bookmakers

The main issues at the time of this article concern Marathonbet and 1xBet. They both have Russian origins and may well be linked in some way; both purport themselves to be very low margin bookmakers. This is all good and well but the prices advertised on Oddsportal are usually unavailable on both bookmaker’s sites.

Perhaps the low margins dictate that the odds move too fast for Oddsportal to keep up?

Whatever the reason, we discard both bookmakers from our scraping, analyses and bet selection processes.

Only if we decide a match fits the selection criteria using the other bookmakers in the pool, will we then consider placing a bet with either of these two and, of course, only if the odds available to buy from either is the highest price we can find…

Manage My Leagues

To save time looking for the leagues you are interested in, Oddsportal allows you to create a reference list offering shortcuts which appear down the left-hand side of each page you view.

In the first screenshot on page 1 of this article, you can see towards the top left-hand corner of the page a black link with an arrow entitled ‘Manage My Leagues’. You can also access this facility in the ‘My Leagues’ tab within ‘Settings’.

However you choose to access the list, it will look like this (truncated list shown):

Oddsportal My Leagues Screenshot

Simply find the league you are looking for and click its box to add a tick. Your chosen league(s) will then be automatically added (and saved) to the ‘My Leagues’ list shown on the left of this image.

Please note that only leagues with up and coming games will be shown as available to add. This also applies to your My Leagues list too: only leagues with forthcoming fixtures will be shown there.

If you don’t want the My Leagues list showing, just simply collapse it by clicking on the upward pointing arrow (top left-hand corner next to the label ‘My Leagues (26)’. The bracketed number indicates that 26 of the leagues we have in our portfolio have up and coming games where odds are currently available.

The first image on page 1 of this article shows the collapsed My Leagues menu. To reopen the collapsed menu, just click on the downward pointing arrow.


Next Page: The Problems of Oddsportal; The Importance of Timestamped Odds