Are Scorecasts Good Bets?

A friend of mine asked me whether scorecast bets are good and my answer was very clear.

No.

The odds look very tempting. Why else would the bookmakers have them advertised in their shop window?

To really understand why these bets are not good you have to think about what you need to come out of them.

Firstly, you need one player to score either first or last (depending on which scorecast bet you do). You have at least twenty players on a team that could score the first or last goal so you need to jump through hoop one to get to the second part of the bet.

The final bit is even more tricky as you need to predict the actual final score. There are countless ways a result can go and, even if you do hit the correct score, you may not have had the first scorer.

Or vice versa.

As I stated earlier, the prices are tempting but there is something to that which turns me off this kind of bet because you aren't getting the proper value.

For example, this past week the price on Fernando Torres to score first and for Liverpool's final score to be 1-0 was at a price of 40/1.

If you looked at the singles on this match - a Torres first goal was 5/1 and a bet on the correct score being 1-0 was priced at 10/1.

All betting shops refuse bets which relate to one another so it would be impossible to bet on Torres first and the correct score being 1-0 other than doing it via their scorecast route. Had you been allowed to do the double in this manner, you would be getting odds of 65/1 whereas the scorecast bet was - as noted above - 40/1.

That's 25 marked off the actual odds so the scorecast is not as attractive as you're led to believe. It doesn't offer the true odds.

It truly is a gimmicky bet to entice people to enter a betting shop. Nothing more, nothing less.