Being the First to Score
Making profitable bets on the first scorer of a football or rugby match is a difficult affair. To be consistently making money, you would have to be literally beating the book maker at their own game. The odds always seem attractive to the layman like 30 to 1 or even 40 to 1, but when did the sweeper ever score the first goal for the team! All the strikers or wingers, who are the hottest scorers all happen to be at some really short odds like 8 to 1 or 10 to 1, so it does not seem worth the risk to actually put the money on them without good odds.
One has to really understand the process back to front to be able to comprehend how the book maker actually comes up with the odds of who is likely to be the first scorer or score at all. Like any good business or business person, they already have spreadsheets detailing when any of the players last scored first and would then be able to work out the type of odds that are likely. A defender in football will only realistically score first perhaps once a season, so hence the big odds for you to win if the unlikely is to actually happen.
Working it out, if a player is at odds of 10 to 1, their actual statistics probably read one in 14 to 15 games that they actually put it through for the bet to come true. So then is this actually a good bet? Probably not since you are behind the eight ball for it to actually win. Are the book makers ever wrong? Yes they are, sometimes they can misjudge whether a player has attacking potential or not, so if you know something they have missed, then best of luck for a big win.
