Pinnacle

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

Play Blackjack

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.

Bet on soccer at Pinnacle

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

Bet Now

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>How do you make accurate betting predictions?</h3>
Honing your betting skills is essentially the pursuit of <a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/Betting-Strategy/how-to-analyse-your-betting-history-with-monte-carlo-simulation/W2M2YAWJHUW5LUZ5">more accurate predictions</a>. This is a challenge that transcends gambling, and has huge implications for spheres such as finance, civic planning and politics, and essentially relates to how we think.
<p>The Greek poet Archilochus suggested that ‘foxes know many things and the hedgehog one big thing’. Several important thinkers since have expanded on this concept to suggest that the way people think can generally be characterised as being Fox or Hedgehog like.</p>
<blockquote>"The Fox-like approach is an agile one, incorporating changing circumstances to refine and adjust your predictions. Anyone who applies Bayesian analysis will quickly recognise the connection"</blockquote>
<p>One of the great difficulties in measuring predictive ability is that those same fields where the implications of the accuracy of predictions are so profound – think poor Intelligence and the Iraq war – accountability is rare, or very difficult to pin down. One man however, has tracked predictions for over two decades, exploring what constitutes good judgement and utilising the Hedgehog vs. Fox distinction. His insights make fascinating and hugely pertinent reading for gamblers.</p>
<p>Philip Tetlock spent 20 years recording the predictions of government officials, professors, journalists and politicians, and discovered that from over 28,000 predictions they were only slightly more accurate than chance. His work and approach are summarised in his 2005 book: ‘Expert Political Judgement? How good is it? How can we know?’</p>
<p>Tetlock developed an array of calibrations and adjustments in order to be fair to those making predictions, and his results were shocking, effectively suggesting that (as a whole) experts were only marginally better than chance.</p>
<p></p>
<div class="articleV2 unordered-list">
<ul>
<li>Read: <a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="/betting-resources/en/betting-strategy/intuition-in-sports-betting/dlj2bxg2nyvpytcs">Does intuition have a place in sports betting?</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>Rather than writing off all forecasters, Tetlock was able to distinguish characteristics that identify someone as being better suited to making more accurate predictions, and these are equally valuable whether you are trying to make a complex policy decision or trying to consistently predict sporting outcomes.</p>
<p>Tetlock’s approach was to avoid looking at specific successes: how many times have you seen tipsters and talking-heads trying to live off the glory of rare headline grabbing predictions? Instead, he gave more credit to consistent predictive success over time and in differing contexts.</p>
<div class="cta-container follow-pinnacle">
<h2>Follow pinnacle on twitter</h2>
<p>Get expert betting insight - our aim is simply to empower bettors to become more knowledgeable.</p>
<a id="TwitterFollowCTA" class="button" href="https://twitter.com/PinnacleSports" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Follow Pinnacle</a></div>
<p>Success wasn’t reduced to a yes or no assessment, because prediction is as much about correctly predicting future events as it is the speed with which you recognise you have got things wrong and subsequently adjust your belief.</p>
<p>It does Tetlock a disservice to summarise his work in a few words, but for the purposes of aspiring gamblers the key take away is to focus on <em>thinking the right way</em>.</p>
<p>Nate Silver provided a useful summary table that outlines the important character traits that Tetlock’s work discovered:</p>
<div class="table-holder-article-content"><span class="table-expand"></span>
<div class="table-modal">
<div class="table-modal-head">
<div class="table-modal-head-inner">
<h2>Are you a Fox or a Hedgehog?</h2>
<span class="table-modal-close"></span></div>
</div>
<div class="table-modal-content">
<div class="article-table-content">
<table class=" article-table">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Fox-like characteristics</strong></p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Hedgehog-like characteristics</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Multidisciplinary </strong>– Incorporates ideas from a range of disciplines</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Specialised </strong>– Often dedicated themselves to one or two big problems &amp; are sceptical of outsiders</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Adaptable </strong>– Try several approaches in parallel, or find a new one if things aren’t working</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Unshakable </strong>– New data is used to refine an original model</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Self-critical </strong>- Willing to accept mistakes and adapt or even replace a model based on new data</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Stubborn </strong>– Mistakes are blamed on poor luck</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Tolerant of complexity </strong>– Accept the world is complex, and that certain things cannot be reduced to a null hypothesis</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Order seeking </strong>– Once patterns are detected, assume relationships are relatively uniform</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Cautious </strong>– Predictions are probabilistic, and qualified</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Confident </strong>– Rarely change or hedge their position</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><strong>Empirical </strong>– Observable data is always preferred over theory or anecdote</p>
</td>
<td>
<p><strong>Ideological </strong>– Approach to predictive problems fits within a similar view of the wider world</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<h3>Predictive skills - Are you a Fox or Hedgehog?</h3>
<p>The Fox-like approach is an agile one, incorporating changing circumstances to refine and adjust your predictions. Anyone who applies Bayesian analysis will quickly recognise the connection.</p>
<p>Bayesian theorem uses an iterative process of assessing what you know about the probability of a future event, then tests the impact of new evidence as it becomes available. Bayes was an 18<sup>th</sup> century English Presbyterian Minister, but almost certainly a fox.</p>
<div class="articleV2 unordered-list">
<ul>
<li>Read: <a style="color: #f50;" id="articleLink" href="/betting-resources/en/betting-psychology/part-one-why-do-we-gamble/pz92y526ql3qtqcw">Why do we gamble?</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<p></p>
Of course a Fox-like approach doesn’t imply infallibility. Getting things wrong is inevitable, the key thing is to use an approach that maximises your chances of getting things right.
<p></p>
<p>Which animal characterises your way of <a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/en/betting-articles/educational/nature-of-uncertainty-in-betting/DVT2YD87E3DZ2J5H">thinking about uncertainty</a>? It may help you improve your betting.</p>
<p><span>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.pinnacle.com/signup/desktop/en-GB?ico=article_psychology&amp;icl=openaccount#signup_homepage"><img src="/sites/default/files/media-image/psychology-openaccount-1.jpg" alt="psychology-openaccount-1.jpg" width="700" height="160" loading="lazy"></a></span></p>

It’s unlikely that you have ever wondered whether you are more like a Fox or a Hedgehog. However, important traits illustrate the way we think and impact our ability to successfully predict. Which animal characterises your way of thinking about uncertainty? Read on to find out.