Under 2.5 using betfair

[Guest ghostdog]

I'm using Geoff Harvey's figures from 'Successful football betting' here, no idea if they are still accurate. He says that in British football the split on under/over is 54/46. ie. 54% of games finish with 2 or less, 46% with 3 or more. I've only had a quick look this week, but on betfair, the majority of Premiership 'under 2.5' were priced at 2 or over. Only two were odds on, Liverpool-Arsenal at 1.93 and Villa-Bolton at 1.84. The clear implication is that there is around an 8% profit to be made by backing all games to be under, as long as you can get an average price of 2. Harvey found the same imbalance on the Tote coupon, but I think it's more pronounced on betfair. He also says that the 'obvious favourite' odds on high goals overestimates the chances of a hatful by the good side. So there is even more value going low in these games. Does this not mean that we should be working on 'under' systems, to ramp up this 8%, rather than taking any of the bad over prices? Am I missing something here? What is the current Prem under/over ratio? I have a subjective feeling there is a trend towards more goals. Can't believe there is such a fundamental and profitable imbalance. Help me out here, surely this is wrong?

[Guest OddsAgainst]

Re: Under 2.5 using betfair Looking at average figures only tells you about the average game, which in reality does not exist. Taking a simplistic view such as this will lead to a caning in the Betfair O/U markets. You need to work out the probabilities for individual games to stand a chance. Knowing the averages can help with this but is not a solution in itself.