Let's first understand the Maths.
Because Dabble Pick Em offers fixed payouts for each bet type, we can actually work out what win rate you need on your player prop selections to be profitable. In other words, knowing the multiplier helps you determine the minimum accuracy required for your picks to overcome the bookmaker’s edge.
Let’s look at the 3-leg option which offers a 6.5x payout. Since every leg must hit for you to collect the payout, the overall probability of winning the bet is the product of the individual probabilities for each leg. Let’s call the probability of a single pick winning p. Then the probability of winning all three legs is:
Overall Win Probability= p^3
For your bet to be break-even, the expected value (EV) must equal your original stake. With a payout multiplier of 6.5x, the break-even condition is:
p3×6.5=1
p = 0.5356 → 53.56%
This means that, on average, you need to win 53.56% of your individual player prop bets to break even on a 3-leg All-In wager.
Ultimately Dabble believes that most punters cannot do this. And they are right. Most punters would be lucky to achieve a 50% record let along 53.56%. In fact, the average punter would probably be around 40-45%
It’s actually quite simple. You just need to find bets that have a higher win probability than 53.5%. Although they are offering line props, the line is never really a 50/50 pick. Often there are bets where one side of the line is a much bigger favourite than the other. We just need to find bets where the true probability of the event occurring is greater than 53.56%.
One of the best ways to calculate the true probability of an event is to calculate the market average price and remove the market juice in order to get a representation of the market probability of the event occurring.
To better understand why this gives a true representation of an event occurring, check out our blog on Positive EV betting where we cover this topic in depth
Let’s take a look at an example. For easier interpretation, let’s convert the 53.56% into odds. 53.56% is the same as 1/0.5356 = 1.867 odds. In order to find a “value” bet, we need to identify bets where the true odds of the event occurring are below 1.867. So essentially, you can think of every leg in a 3-leg pick-em to be priced at 1.867.
The Pick’Em dashboard will just show you a bunch of lines. You then need to determine the fair odds price and try and find one under 1.867.
As an example, let’s take a look at Anthony Edwards assists.
Right now we can see that under 5.5 assists for Edwards is heavily favoured and well below 1.867. However the prices above include the bookie edge. We need to remove that to understand if it will still be expected value positive.