Correct Score Football Bets

The Correct Score football betting market is easily one of the riskiest types of wagers you’ll see on a betting slip. To be fair, there are definitely bigger long-shots to choose from at the best online sportsbooks. However, few of these long-odds options are anything more than niche offers most punters ignore. Correct Score, however, remains very popular.

Is there a solid reason for this, though? Or can it be chalked up to the fact most sports bettors lose way more than they win? Keep reading for an in-depth Correct Score betting guide.

What Is Correct Score in Football Betting?

A correct score bet predicts the exact final score of a match. It’s most often associated with football betting simply because not many goals happen in a single soccer match, relatively speaking. It’s a fairly simple type of bet to understand. If the exact score of a match after 90 minutes matches your prediction, you win. In all other cases, you lose.

If that sounds difficult to get right, it’s because it is. Correct Score betting odds usually sit at around 10:1 or more, depending on the match. To make matters more complicated, you also need to guess which team scores how many goals. Unlike, say, the Over/Under Goals Scored market, which team scores how many times is crucial information. This is also the difference between the Correct Score and Total Goals markets.

Let’s take a look at an example. Say you’re looking at a match between team A and team B. In a sportsbook, the Correct Score bet market will offer usually dozens of options, including:

• Team A 1-0
• Team A 2-0
• Draw 1-1
• Draw 0-0
• Team B 2-1
• Team B 4-1

Or pretty much any combination of possible score outcomes. As you might imagine, the team name in the selection denotes the winning team – the one with the higher score. It’s possible to bet on a lot of Correct Score options – usually going up to 6-0 or even 6-5. Finally, there is also often the Any Other Score. This selection is generally reserved for extremely unlikely outcomes not represented with other selections.

Correct Score Betting Strategy

Correct Score wagers invariably have long odds at the cost of relatively low probabilities. That’s just the nature of the market. However, a lot of experienced punters advise sticking to ‘safe’ bets as the best strategy for beginners. There’s some sense to that, but the primary concern of every smart bettor isn’t the probability of success – it’s betting value.

In other words, the offered betting odds should be better than the chances of the bet winning. Even if those chances are not that high to begin with. Now, bookmakers price Correct Score odds based on several factors. Namely, the probability of the team winning, the stats for the teams and how much they score on average, H2H histories, and so on. However, this market is extremely difficult to get right for bettors, so it’s quite hard to price properly as well. Most bookies just take the easy way of basing the odds on the teams’ probability of winning.

This is when a punter can leverage an advantage. As a concrete example, teams with an equal chance of winning often have the same odds on each score. However, depending on their strategies and habits, the actual probability of some outcomes is much different.

Unfortunately, there is no step-by-step way to find such Correct Score betting opportunities. You simply have to dig through hundreds of betting offers, study team strategies and histories, and apply them to your bets.

However, we can give you some Correct Score betting tips to help you find the right matches.

Focus on Smaller Scorelines

In addition to being generally safer, low-scoring Correct Score predictions are better in several other ways. Ideally, you’ll want to look for matches likely to confirm the Under 2.5 or even Under 1.5 markets. Why? Simply put, there are fewer possible outcomes, so you’re more likely to get it right.

Look at it this way – a game with 1 or fewer goals per team can end in 0-0, 1-0, 0-1, or 1-1. A match with 4 total goals or more has dozens of possible permutations. Besides, the market is risky enough as it is, and there’s no real need to push for longer odds.

Correct Score Betting Promotions

Some top bookies often offer betting promotions called the Bore refund. Essentially, games ending in 0-0 get their Correct Score stakes refunded. If you’re already betting on a low-scoring match, 0-0 is likely one of the biggest threats to your wager. Eliminating it can do wonders for your bottom line.

Look at Smaller Leagues

Remember what we said about how bookies price Correct Score bets? Well, that’s not always the case for, say, Premier League Correct Score bets. Sportsbooks will put a lot more effort into correctly pricing these matches – and have a lot more information available.

Instead, try going off the beaten path. Look at second- and third-tier competitions in smaller countries, for instance. Be warned, though – this leaves room for more betting value, but also carries the risk of ending up with wider bookmaker margins.

You should now have all the info you need to make good Correct Score betting predictions. However, keep in mind that even the best of these wagers are still very risky. Expect to lose most of them, even if they offer great value.