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What Are Blackjack Side Bets?Side bets are bonus bets placed on a round of Blackjack on outcomes beyond whether the player or dealer will win. The majority are staked at the start of the round before the cards have been dealt alongside regular bets and many have fixed odds that usually offer greater payouts than the simple 2:1 rewarded for beating the dealer.Play Blackjack at Pinnacle Casino

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Side bets provide an exciting way to make Blackjack games more interesting whilst offering you a greater number of ways to win. So what are side bets, what side bets are available and are they worth it? Read on to find out.

Blackjack Side Bets Explained

Finding a niche market in betting can often lead to value. This can be anything from specialist knowledge of handball betting to extensive experience in betting on Japanese baseball. Providing you know more than the bookmaker, there is money to be made.  &lt;Bet on soccer at Pinnacle&gt; They also make for interesting and potentially profitable bets, as they can be a little more reliable

Soccer odds

A corner is one of the most inexplicably exciting events in soccer. Only around three per cent of them lead to a goal, but you can guarantee that the attacking team’s fans will roar their approval and encouragement if their team are awarded one. Read on to find out how you can benefit from betting on corners.

Corners betting in soccer: Value in a lesser-known market

Poisson Distribution is a mathematical concept for translating mean averages into a probability for variable outcomes across a distribution. For example, if we know Manchester City average 1.7 goals per game, so by putting the Poisson Distribution formula tells us that this average equates to Manchester City&nbsp;scoring 0 goals 18.3% of the time, 1 goal 31% of the time, 2 goals 26.4% of the time and 3 goals 15% of the time.

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Poisson Distribution: Predict the score in soccer betting

What is Expected Value?The amount a player can expect to win or lose if they were to place a bet on the same odds many times over, calculated through a simple equation multiplying your probability of winning with the amount you could win per bet, and subtracting the probability of losing multiplied by the amount lost per bet.A simple example of Expected Value (EV) put into practice -&nbsp;if you were

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The Expected Value of a bet shows us how much we can expect to win (on average) per bet, and as such is the most valuable calculation a bettor can make when comparing bookmakers' odds. How can you calculate Expected Value in sports betting in order to predict your winnings? Read on to find out.

How to Calculate Expected Value

<p>We have a team of editors and writers at Pinnacle, as well as a collection of external contributors, ranging from university lecturers and renowned authors, to ex-traders and esteemed sports experts. Collectively, the Pinnacle team and external contributors produce the educational content within Betting Resources.</p>


<h3><strong>What is a March Madness bracket?</strong></h3>

<p>A March Madness bracket is a way of betting on the NCAA Division 1 Basketball Tournament. Contestants attempt to correctly predict the team that will advance from each matchup.</p>

<p>This is big news, with even Warren Buffett <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/no-one-won-warren-buffetts-march-madness-multimillion-dollar-prize.html" target="_blank"><span>famously running</span></a> his own bracket tournament.</p>

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<p>The best odds on NCAA basketball</p>
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<h3><strong>What are the odds of a perfect March Madness bracket?</strong></h3>

<p>If each match in the tournament were a 50/50 coin toss then the odds of predicting each one correctly would be 2<sup>63</sup> or one in 9.22 quintillion.</p>

<p>Of course each game is not a 50/50 outcome. Many games have a very strong favorite which makes selecting a perfect March Madness bracket more likely.</p>

<p>If the pre-match odds-on favorite had won every game in the 2018 edition of March Madness then by simply selecting the favorite for each game bettors could get their chance of winning down to one in 199,207,883.</p>

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<p>Unfortunately, the odds directly prior to the games take into account information that bracket selectors would not have had access to. As a result, the favorite for a given game may have switched post-selection. The bookmaker margin on each game is also not taken into account, making this number incredibly idealistic.</p>

<p>In fact, taking the pre-game odds from the 2018 edition of March Madness, the chances of selecting the perfect bracket according to the bookmaker odds before each game was an astonishing one in 1,844,155,546,199,950 or 1.84 quadrillion.</p>

<h3><strong>Things more likely than selecting a perfect bracket</strong></h3>

<p>These are, of course, inaccurate probabilities but, just for fun, these things were/are all more likely to occur than a given individual selecting a perfect bracket in 2018:</p>

<p><strong>Nine trillion times more likely</strong>: San Marino to defeat then-reigning soccer World Champions Germany in Nuremberg.</p>

<p><strong>368 billion times more likely</strong>: Leicester winning the 2016 Premier League title at 5001.00.</p>

<p><strong>6.31 million times more likely</strong>: winning the billion-dollar Powerball lottery.</p>

<p><strong>72000 times more likely</strong>: Being struck by lightning every single day for 10 years.</p>

<p><strong>607 times more likely</strong>: Selecting the same individual tree at random as your friend from a choice of every tree on the planet.</p>

<p><strong>1.84 times more likely</strong>: Selecting a pre-chosen individual ant from an anthill containing every single ant on earth.</p>

<p>For perspective, if the odds of all the favorites winning in each of the matchups during the 2018 tournament (~199 million to one) were converted to seconds, then the duration would be 6.32 years.</p>

<p>The odds of the actual results that occurred convert to 58,477,789 years.</p>

<h3><strong>Was UMBC’s 2018 win overdue?</strong></h3>

<p>The 2018 tournament was complicated by a historic victory as 16<sup>th </sup>seed UMBC triumphed over the number one seed Virginia. This was the first time in tournament history that the bottom seed had defeated a top seed.</p>

<p>In fact, UMBC’s victory ensured that not one bracket remained intact after the first round of the NCAA tournament had finished.</p>

<p>However, a victory for such a team was perhaps overdue. UMBC closed at 21.28 in Pinnacle’s <a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/odds/match/basketball/ncaa/matchups" target="_blank"><span>March Madness odds</span></a> ahead of the game, an implied probability of 4.7%.</p>

<p>Given that four such matchups occur every tournament and there have been 34 editions of the tournament featuring 64 teams it is surprising that UMBC were first winners at such odds.</p>

<p>Assuming UMBC vs. Virginia was a standard first round #16 vs. #1 matchup, taking Virginia’s odds of winning the game, there’s around a 14.78% chance that we had to wait until 2018 for a first 16th seed win.</p>

<p>Is this just variance, or is there perhaps some <a href="/betting-resources/en/betting-strategy/explaining-favourite-longshot-bias/vun2u32r85ppf4yp" target="_blank">favorite-longshot bias</a>&nbsp;in the <a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/odds/match/basketball/ncaa/matchups" target="_blank"><span>NCAA tournament odds</span></a> at play here?</p>

<h3><strong>Why not just bet on the games?</strong></h3>

<p>While selecting a March Madness bracket is a fun activity, it would be much more financially rewarding to simply bet on the outcome of the individual games.</p>

<p>While a prize of $1,000,000 in cash sounds appealing, in 2018 a $1 rolling bet would have returned $1.84 quadrillion if you had achieved the impossible and called every game correctly.</p>

<h3>When is NCAA March Madness 2024?</h3>

<p>2023 was a wild tournament, with all four #1 seeds getting eliminated before the Elite 8. The #4 UConn Huskies defeated the #5 San Diego State Aztecs in the National Championship game. In 2024, the tournament will culminate at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona with the Final Four on April 6 and National Championship game on April 8.</p>

<h3><strong>March Madness 2024 bracket predictions</strong></h3>

<p>If you are selecting a March Madness bracket then it is important to remember that betting odds are the most effective judges of probability.</p>

<p>The optimal strategy is most likely to just select the odds-on favorite for each game. The difficulty with this approach is projecting which team will be the favorite for a given matchup. Perhaps the NCAA tournament winner odds could be used as an indication?</p>

<p>Find <a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/basketball/ncaa/matchups#ncaa-tourney-winner" target="_blank"><strong>Pinnacle's unrivalled NCAA odds</strong></a> and make your play on the tournament.</p>


NCAA Basketball Odds

What are the odds of a perfect March Madness bracket?

The 2022 NCAA basketball tournament features the best college basketball teams from across the US. It is notoriously difficult to predict and great fun to watch. What is a March Madness bracket? What are the odds of selecting a perfect bracket? Is there a way to make March Madness bracket predictions? Read on to find out.

The NCAA basketball tournament features the best college basketball teams from across the US. It is notoriously difficult to predict and great fun to watch. What is a March Madness bracket? What are the odds of selecting a perfect bracket? Is there a way to make March Madness bracket predictions? Read on to find out.