A case in point - tonight's Europa league match; Astana (bottom of the table with 0 points and cannot qualify) v Manchester Utd (currently top of the table and already qualified, although still not certain to finish top with another round still to play after tonight). Betfair's odds on an away win is around 2.0 - nice odds by the sound of it.
Dig deeper, and you find (taken from the BBC website on tonight's match preview);
- Manchester United have named an inexperienced squad for Thursday's Europa League game
- Manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's 18-man squad features 14 teenagers - with 10 yet to play a first-team game.
- After tonight's game, United have to play nine games in December, having also reached the Carabao Cup quarter-finals.
- Their Under-21 side will also play in the Leasing.com Trophy knockout stage, having won each group game, so Solskjaer has selected several of those players, along with some fit-again fringe players.
"It's common sense," said Solskjaer. "We have done great to qualify after four games, so it gives us an opportunity to give game time to the experienced lads who need it: Axel [Tuanzebe], Luke [Shaw] and Jesse [Lingard]. They've not really had too many games and they're coming back from injuries".
"It's hard with the young kids to give them enough games against men - professional games. We've got the EFL Trophy and for me this is a great chance for me to see them all together."
So, with Astana playing at home in sunny Azerbaijan against a bunch of kids and some returning (non-match fit ?) seniors... does evens still look like a good bet ? To be fair, odds are calculated on probable outcome, and there are banks of bookie computers with complicated algorithms working out the likelyhoods of results, so we can moderately assume that evens is about the right place to decide the outcome one way or another... so I guess the better question is whether you think Man Utd will win tonight and not let the odds themselves sway your judgement (LOL - unless of course your decision-making is based on value, in which case do you disagree with evens as the benchmark ?).
Ironically, after saying all that, I do often use odds as a kind of filter... but only to compliment my systems and because it has a positive outcome on profit/loss. I don't necessarily use it as a starting point for bet selection (as APS seems to be doing).
Man Utd's squad for tonight;
Goalkeepers: Lee Grant (36), Matej Kovar (19).
Defenders: Max Taylor (19), Luke Shaw (24), Axel Tuanzebe (22), Teden Mengi (17), Di'Shon Bernard (19), Ethan Laird (18).
Midfielders: Dylan Levitt (19), Ethan Galbraith (18), Arnau Puigmal (18), James Garner (18), Jesse Lingard (26), Tahith Chong (19), Angel Gomes (19).
Forwards: Largie Ramazani (19), D'Mani Bughail-Mellor (19), Mason Greenwood (18).