Are Bet Builders and Bet Requests Good Value Or Should You Avoid Them?

The invention of the likes of Bet Builders and Bet Request features have been a boon for punters. The ability to get in touch with a bookmaker and ask them to give you odds on whatever random events you think might happen in a match has genuinely opened up the world of betting in ways that we never thought possible in the past.

Don’t misunderstand, it’s always been possible to pop into a bookmaker’s and ask them to give you odds on whatever concoction of events you wanted, but since the move to predominantly online betting that has been much harder.

Of course, the fact that you can ask a bookmaker for odds on there being 14 throw-ins, a penalty, a headed goal scored by the star striker and a pigeon landing on the referee’s head is great. Equally, that you can use the Bet Builder facility to build your own accumulators within the confines of the markets included on the feature by your bookie of choice also adds a degree of interest to the world of betting.

But, the obvious question that comes along is whether or not these bet types are actually good value. After all, bookmakers survive thanks to the ability to create their own margin, so do the customers suffer when they’re inventing the bets and the margins?

Calculating The Odds

As everyone knows, bookies build margins into the odds that they offer to customers, meaning that they’ll always make a profit regardless of the outcome of the event.

The odds that they offer will be deliberately enticing and off-putting in order to encourage people to bet on the less likely outcome and avoid placing bets on the most likely, thereby giving them a chance to balance their books no matter what happens. The bigger an event or market is, the more likely it is that people will place bets on it so the bookmakers don’t struggle to cover themselves in those instances.

The same cannot be said of the markets that fewer people bet on, nor the ones when there are numerous potential outcomes that rather naturally offer more risk to the bookies. The risks need to be offset as best they can, meaning that the bookmakers need to build in a larger margin to help them avoid losing money.

The reason that Bet Builders are so popular with the bookies is that they encourage people to combine individual markets to make them less likely to succeed, meaning that the companies can magnify their odds and their margins.

To put it another way, betting on the outcome of a high profile football match, such as the winner of the semi-final of the World Cup, is something that loads of punters will do and the odds will therefore be decent from most bookmakers as they compete with each other to get your bets.

When you bet on an outcome that includes something like; the correct score, the goalscorer and the number of goal-kicks, however, you’ve created a market that not many other bookies will be offering so your bookmaker of choice has no need to offer a particularly competitive set of odds. Instead they can put in a decent margin for themselves and you’ll have to take it if they’re the only ones offering the markets.

Bookmakers use computer algorithms to create their Bet Builder odds, which take into account the likely outcome of the various individual scenarios and also take into account any other factors that might be relevant to their outcome. The conversation about whether or not the odds that are offered at the end of it are good value pretty much comes down to your own interpretation of what that means.

If you are reasonably convinced that your bet will win then you’ll feel as though you’re going to make money regardless. You’d still be wise to see what odds you can get on all of the occurrences happening individually, however, as that way if one of them doesn’t you’ll still win some money.

What About Request-A-Bet Features?

The above is pretty much all about the world of Bet Builder features, but what of the bookmakers that will allow you to request-a-bet? Bet Builders are great because they’re essentially accumulators that allow you to bet on related contingencies, which normal Accas don’t allow for.

Head to the world of Request-A-Bet, however, and you’re entering an entirely different marketplace where virtually anything is requestable.

The problem with this, of course, is that you’re opening yourself up to markets that aren’t common, which means that bookmakers have no necessity whatsoever to offer you very good odds. Let’s take the example from the introduction of there being 14 throw-ins, a penalty, a headed goal scored by the star striker and a pigeon landing on the referee’s head. Unless there’s been a Pigeon Landing On Heads competition next door to the stadium the morning of the match, the likelihood of these things happening would be astronomical in reality.

In practice it’s a different matter, however. Should every single bookmaker be offering odds on those things happening then they’ll all have to be competitive in order to avoid you placing your bets with a competitor instead of with them. Yet not every bookie will be offering odds on those markets, so they know you’ll either need to take the odds you’re offered or else not place the bet.

Even going to a different bookmaker that also offers Request-A-Bet won’t make any difference because they’ll also know that you’ve got no real option when it comes to who to bet with. The market is limited so an outcome that should have odds of, say, 5,000/1 will be offered to you at 1,000/1 instead.

Now on the one hand odds of 1,000/1 are nothing to turn your nose up at, but on the other when you know you should be given more than five times that you’ll feel a bit shortchanged. Yet that’s what happens with these sort of bespoke bets, because bookmakers know they’re offering a service you can’t really get anywhere else.

In the end it comes do whether you think any bet whatsoever, even one with poor value odds, is better than not being able to place the bet at all. No one can answer that question for you, so you’ll probably just need to know that the value isn’t on your side but if the bet comes in the money will be.

Value Doesn’t Always Matter

The final thing worth mentioning here is that value isn’t always the thing that people take into account when they’re placing their bets. We know, for example, that the lottery is generally pretty poor value but we play it anyway. As an example, the odds are roughly 1 in 45 million that you’ll win the jackpot on the National Lottery. Move to the Euromillions and they increase even further to 1 in 139.8 million. Does that put you off playing? No, because the chance of turning your £2.50 into £60 million is far too good to resist.

The same logic comes into play when you’re looking at the odds of Bet Builder and Request-A-Bet features. Yes, you now it’s unlikely that a pigeon is going to land on the referee’s head, but you had a vision of one doing it so imagine how you’d feel if you didn’t place your bet and then a pigeon went and landed on the referee’s head!

This is a facetious example, of course, but even if you looked at something slightly more common it’s still unlikely that a series of random events will all take place within the same match and you know it, but you’ll place the bet anyway because the possibility of turning £1 into £1,000 is too much to resist.

At the end of the day betting is supposed to be fun and a leisure pursuit, and if you like bet builders or bet requests don’t let it stop you from having a go.  It is just worth being aware that these bets tend to carry high margins and lower value.  The same is true of accumulators, where margins are additive, but that doesn’t stop the acca from being one of the most popular bet types.

This is one reason why you will find lots of free bets and offers for bet builders and bet request features, as the bookies want you to use them, just as a shop would want you to buy products they make the most money from. Professionals don’t use bet builders, bet requests or accas, but then they have little fun when they gamble so don’t let that sway you.