What Is a Dead Heat in Sports Betting and How Does It Affect Your Winnings?
In the world of sports betting, there are special situations that can complicate the outcome of your bets. One of the most common—but often misunderstood—is the dead heat.
If you’ve ever seen an event end with two or more competitors tied in first place, you’ve likely encountered a dead heat. But what does that mean for your bet? How does the bookmaker calculate your winnings? Let’s break it down.
What is a Dead Heat?
A dead heat occurs when two or more participants in a competition finish tied in the same winning position. For example, two runners cross the finish line at exactly the same time, or two horses finish neck-and-neck for first place.
This tie means that the bookmaker must split the winning bet among the tied competitors, since there is no sole winner.
How Do Bookmakers Calculate Payouts in a Dead Heat?
When there’s a dead heat, the bookmaker adjusts your payout to reflect the division of the prize among the tied winners. The standard procedure is:
Divide the stake among the tied participants:
If there are two winners, your bet is split in two equal parts; if there are three, into three parts, and so on.Pay out only the “winning” portion:
Only one part of your bet is considered a winner and paid out at the original odds.
The remaining portions corresponding to the other tied participants are considered losses.
Example:
Let’s say you bet €10 on a horse to win at odds of 4.0, but there’s a dead heat between two horses for first place. Then:
Your €10 stake is split into two €5 parts.
Only one part (€5) is considered a winner and pays at 4.0: €5 x 4.0 = €20
The other part (€5) is lost.
Your total return is €20, meaning your net profit is €10 (instead of €30 if there were no dead heat).
Is It Worth Following Strategies Based on Dead Heat?
Understanding dead heat is important because it directly affects your profits and risk management.
But be warned: dead heats are rare, and more importantly, you can’t build a stable, consistent strategy around them. In other words, you can’t rely on a dead heat to win more money or reduce losses—it’s too unpredictable and infrequent.
Yes, it might happen that you bet on a competitor who ties for first place with a favorite and receive a partial payout that helps you minimize your loss or secure a small gain. But this is an exception, not a rule.
Trying to make money relying on rare, random events like dead heats is a bad idea. It’s not a strategy—it’s speculation, and far too risky.
Professional bettors and those who aim to win sustainably don’t rely on unpredictable outcomes. They look for systematic, mathematically justified strategies.
So What Strategies Do Work?
The answer lies in betting only when there is positive expected value—in other words, Value Bets—and placing bets that guarantee profit, known as Sure Bets.
What Are Value Bets?
Value Bets are bets where the odds offered by the bookmaker are higher than the actual probability of the event happening. That means the bookmaker is underestimating the real probability, offering a higher payout than they should. Betting on these odds gives you a mathematical edge in the long term, because repeating this strategy often leads to consistent profits.
Quick example:
If you calculate that a team has a 50% chance of winning (0.5 probability), but the bookmaker offers odds of 2.2 (which implies a 45.5% probability), that’s a Value Bet.
You’re betting with value because the odds are higher than they should be.
What Are Sure Bets?
Sure Bets are combinations of bets placed on different sportsbooks or different outcomes of the same event, which guarantee a profit no matter the result. This happens when odds are misaligned between bookmakers, and you can stake proportional amounts to cover all outcomes and secure a profit.
Quick example:
In a tennis match, one bookmaker offers 2.10 on Player A and another offers 2.10 on Player B.
By betting proportionally on both sides, you’re guaranteed a profit regardless of who wins.
Dead heats can affect the result of a bet if they happen, but in the case of Value Bets and Sure Bets, their impact is already factored in as part of the payout variations. It’s not something to base your strategy on, just a factor to keep in mind. What matters is that these strategies are mathematically solid and don’t rely on rare or random events.
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The reality is that doing all this manually is virtually IMPOSSIBLE.
Because bookmaker pricing errors last only seconds.
Odds change constantly.
And to detect these opportunities, you need to:
Compare thousands of odds in real time
Calculate margins
Place bets without making mistakes
A human can’t do this.
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While you’re doing something else, BetOven has already found and placed the best “combo” out there:
a chain of safe and profitable decisions.
How does it work?
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✅ Repeats the process hundreds of times a day, increasing volume and making the strategy scalable
What BetOven does is exploit the only structural weakness of bookmakers:
momentary pricing errors.
Errors that a manual bettor either misses entirely or spots too late.
BetOven is the number 1 automated sports arbitrage software, specifically designed to automate the betting process while ensuring the maximization of our profits, both in surebets and valuebets. It is such a powerful tool that it can detect errors made by bookmakers in real-time when setting their odds, and automatically place bets on these errors.
In the following video, you can see how BetOven’s AI works and how you can try it for free to maximize your profits in sports betting:
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