Yield in sports betting
What is the betting yield? | What is considered a good yield?
If you’ve been betting on sports for a while, you’ve probably heard the term yield more than once. But could you define it precisely, calculate it and say what it’s for?
Yield is the return on your bets: it measures, as a percentage, how much you’ve made (or lost) relative to the money you’ve staked. It’s one of the most widely used indicators for judging a betting method, because it puts bets of different sizes on the same footing.
Backing a price is easy. Knowing exactly what return your last bet (or your last hundred) produced is harder. Let’s see what yield means in sports betting and how it’s calculated.
What is the Yield in a bet?
Let’s start with what it isn’t: many people confuse yield with net profit, that is, with how much you got back on top of your stake. Net profit is an amount in pounds or euros; yield is the ratio between that profit and the amount staked, expressed as a percentage.
To calculate the yield of a bet, here’s a hypothetical example, just to show the maths: you stake €20 at odds of 1.20 and the bet wins. You get €24 back, so the net profit is €4. Divide 4 by the €20 staked and multiply by 100.
It’s a very simple formula that gives a percentage: that number is the yield, the profit (or loss) relative to the money staked.
The yield formula
Yield (%) = net profit ÷ total staked × 100
Net profit = amount returned − amount staked. If it’s negative, the yield is negative too.
In the example: 4 ÷ 20 × 100 = 20%. If the same bet had lost, the net profit would have been −€20 and the yield −100%.
That’s why the yield of a single bet tells you very little. It becomes useful when you calculate it across many bets together: add up the net profit of all of them, winners and losers, and divide it by the total staked. For example, 50 bets of €20 make €1,000 staked: with a final balance of +€30 the yield for the period is 3%; with a balance of −€45, it’s −4.5%.
That’s what knowing the yield of your bets is for: telling whether a method works beyond individual results, and spotting strategy mistakes early, before losses build up.
As you’ve seen, yield can also be negative. If it stays that way over time, it’s a sign the strategy isn’t working as it should, often because bets are placed on gut feeling rather than numbers. That’s why it makes sense to choose bets with a mathematical criterion, as with surebets (every outcome of an event is covered at different bookmakers) and valuebets (you only bet when the odds are higher than the real probability justifies).
In the video below you can see how BetOven works: the software that detects surebets and valuebets and places the bets on the accounts you connect, following the rules you set:
BetOven is AI-powered betting automation software for Windows: it compares live odds across several bookmakers, detects the price differences behind surebets and valuebets and places the bets automatically on your own accounts, using the filters you choose.
It doesn’t work with tips or luck, but with a calculation: it only bets when the odds meet the conditions you’ve set. In the web dashboard you’ll find your history, balances and statistics per bookmaker, yield included.
What is considered a good Yield?
A negative yield sustained over time means the method is losing money: in the medium term, the only way to keep going is to deposit new funds.
Any yield that stays consistently above zero is a good sign, because it shows that, on average, the odds you took paid more than the events were worth. But there’s no threshold that applies to everyone: a good yield depends on the type of bet.
- Surebets: the margin of each trade is known before you bet and is usually small. The resulting yield is modest but with little variance; it’s reduced by odds that move between one bet and the next, voided bets and rules that differ between bookmakers.
- Valuebets: the margin is theoretical and only shows up over the long run. In the short term the yield can swing a lot, even below zero, through plain variance.
- Tips and tipsters: here the margin can’t be measured before you bet. A double-digit yield only counts if it’s calculated over hundreds of bets with a verifiable record: over a few dozen bets it can be down to chance.
More than the figure for a single month, what matters is that the yield stays positive over hundreds of bets, with consistent stakes.
How to increase the Yield of your bets?
As you’d expect, to increase yield you need to increase the margin you get on your bets, not just the number of winners. That means knowing the market odds and measuring results over a long period.
The yield of a single bet doesn’t help here: it only gives you an isolated figure for the last one. To really know how you’re doing, you need to calculate it across many bets and follow its trend.
If you want to raise it, the way is to bet only when the odds contain a measurable error, i.e. valuebets and surebets instead of relying on intuition.
Luck is a factor we can neither control nor measure. That’s why I recommend using the same tools the bookmakers use: maths and technology, so you bet with a criterion.
But let’s take it one step at a time:
If you keep a record of your bets, you’re probably already doing the maths to see whether you’re up or down. It’s the minimum for judging a method over the long run.
The next step is to work out, before you bet, whether a bet has value and how much: that is, whether the odds pay more than the real probability of the event justifies.
Bookmakers build their odds to keep a margin over the long run, and they use very sophisticated tools to do it. But they don’t all update their odds at the same speed, especially during live matches.
So how do you take them on at their own game?
✅👉 With tools that can spot, within moments, the live odds that sit out of line with the rest of the market.
That’s what BetOven does: software designed to automate finding and placing surebets and valuebets. How much does it return? That depends above all on your capital, how many bookmakers you connect and how you configure the software. That’s why BetOven shows you the real yield of your trades, period by period and bookmaker by bookmaker, so you judge it on your own numbers.
Track your Yield at Bookmakers
BetOven makes it simple to keep track of your sports bets: it records every trade and lets you follow your yield in detail, because it only bets on a mathematical criterion, i.e. it uses algorithms to detect surebets and valuebets.
💎 BetOven’s software is specialised in finding differences between the odds offered by different bookmakers for the same event, so it can pick out bets whose odds are overpriced. In other words, its job is to detect the pricing errors bookmakers make when setting some odds. These errors sometimes last only moments: BetOven detects them and places the bet automatically.
If you don’t want to look for them by hand, BetOven does it for you. With the free trial you can see how it works based on the settings and preferences you choose.
Betting yield: from calculation to automation
Now that you know how yield is calculated and why it has to be measured across many bets, you can apply it to yours: note down stakes, odds and results and check your return at regular intervals.
If you’d rather keep placing your bets by hand, that’s fine: the maths is the same. If you want to understand which strategy holds up over time and see what automation looks like, you can find out how BetOven works, a system that automates finding and placing surebets and valuebets on your own accounts.
With BetOven, yield becomes a figure you follow bet by bet. The software brings together the tools and data to run your strategy; your part is choosing the filters and checking your balances from time to time. The main risk in a surebet is that the odds change between one bet and the next: exactly what the speed of software reduces.
Our Free Training
Would you like to learn more about sports arbitrage? Your free trial includes access to the BetHunter Academy.
In this training you’ll learn how surebets and valuebets work and how to automate them with BetOven, the software that places the bets on your own accounts while you set the rules.
✔️ Focused on automation: how to set up BetOven and run your strategy with it.
✔️ Free: included with the free trial, at no cost.
✔️ Step by step: from the key concepts to the settings experienced bettors use.
