2019 Grey Cup Winner: What The Bookies Say

To win a lottery – any lottery, from keno to bingo to scratch cards and the classic form of buying tickets – you need to be lucky. To win at the casino games listed at GamblingInsider.ca, you need more than luck – you need to know the odds, use various strategies, and, of course, you need to have fun, as that’s what casino games are about. But chance has little to do with sports betting – it’s not about luck but about statistics, records, and predictions based on them. This is why it’s a good idea to take a peek at what bookmakers say when trying to predict the result of a sporting event, no matter if it’s a boxing match or the Grey Cup. Let’s see which team bookmakers around the world expect to be the winner this year.

The odds

The further away the final is, the more fluid the odds are – there are many unpredictable changes that oddsmakers, who are not fortune tellers, by the way, can take into account. The odds for the winners are changing from one week to another. Only a week ago, the B.C. Lions were the team considered the most likely to win the Grey Cup this year – today, the odds have once again changed, putting the Calgary Stampeders in the pole position once again. The Edmonton Eskimos, who lost Mike Reilly to the Lions earlier this year, is expected to underperform this year, but it is still expected to beat teams like the Toronto Argonauts and the Montreal Alouettes, the two teams expected to do equally wrong in the cup. The Roughriders, the Redblacks, and the Tiger-Cats have an almost equal chance to win the Grey Cup this year, bookmakers say, with the Blue Bombers doing a bit better. The bookies expect the final to be a showdown between the Lions and the Stampeders, with the defending champion having a slightly better chance to win the championship.

How the odds are calculated

Bookmakers offer their customers several bet types with different “maturities” – in-play bets placed during a game, pre-game bets, and futures bets. Out of these three, the futures bets are the least predictable, given that their “maturity” is (as their name suggests) in the pretty far future, often in months. These futures bets can be pretty attractive due to their big prospective payouts.

The odds are an expression of the probability of something happening. In the case of betting, the lower the number representing the odds, the higher the probability of an outcome (like in our case, the Stampeders’ winning the Grey Cup has odds of +275, while the Argonauts winning carries odds of +1400). To calculate the odds, the bookmakers take a good look at the teams’ history, records, and statistics, on the individual players’ stats, and take into account potentially influential events like player transfers, injuries, sometimes even the weather, to try and predict the outcome of a match (or in our case, an entire championship) as precisely as possible. Of course, the further into the future the event is, the less predictable it becomes.

The odds presented above are the perfect example for “futures”, considering that we are not even in the preseason – they will surely change a lot in the future.