Make money high-odds betting on Valorant (You can’t)

High Odds betting is the strategy of consistently betting on the team with the higher payout and lower chance of winning. The idea is that although you are less likely to win each individual bet, the high payout when you do win will cover the cost of all your previous losses. I choose this strategy because of two main reasons. First, I don’t know much about betting and this is a relatively simple strategy to simulate. Second, high odds betting works specially in events with high upset potential. The more the underdogs win, the more you are likely to profit using this strategy. And Champions was primed for underdogs to take it all.

I decided to simulate betting $100 the underdog team every match of the tournament. I used data from gg.bet to determine the underdogs and favorites. For the sake of comparison, I also recorded a simulation of betting $100 on the favorite team in every game.

The tournament kicked off with the Group Stage. 4 groups with 4 teams each and only 2 teams from each would make it to the playoffs. The groups stage had double-elimination bracket, so an upset match wouldn’t kill a good team immediately.

My underdogs strategy started off strong, with NAVI defeating Team Liquid 2–0, earning a $147 profit in the first match. The next match followed up again with a $94 profit. The next three games wiped out my $241 profit and then some. I then hit the jackpot. BLG, underdogs versus NRG, wins against then giving me huge returns of $847. This would help me cover my 8 next games even if I lost each of them. And lost I did, the next five games in a row. Afterwards a small win of $200, half of which was the profit, then off to losing we go. I then lost 7 games in a row. In the final match of the group stage, NRG helped me recuperate some of then losses by losing against BLG again.

Overall, the underdogs won 5 out of 20 games in the group stage. The total betting cost was $2000, the wins totaled up to $1983, resulting in a loss of just $17. The majority of my group stage losses were covered by NRG (thanks Fenis). Onto the playoffs we go.

The playoffs had the same double-elimination bracket as the group stage, meaning that a team needed to lose two matches to get eliminated. There were eight teams present, two from each group. I was expecting to lose big, as big upset teams like NRG had already been eliminated. With 14 games in total left, let’s see what happens.

LOUD’s victory against the tournament favorites, Fnatic, gave me a handsome profit of $246. However, there were no upsets for the next nine games and this streak of underdog losses essentially doomed my chances of turning a profit. Finally, the underdogs triumphed in the last four games, crowning EG as the victors against PRX in a magnificent clash of the giants.

The underdogs won five out of 14 matches which is not a bad ratio. However, the wins resulted in a much lower payout overall. I spent $1400 on bets and only won back $1200, resulting in a net loss of $200.

In total, I spent $3400 on bets and won back $3183, resulting in an overall loss of $217. I guess I needed a few more NRGs to make my strategy work.

Let’s compare the low odds betting strategy to the high odds betting strategy. Although it made $155 in the group stage, the low odds betting strategy resulted in a net loss of $17, as the profit was wiped out by a loss of $172 in the playoffs. Overall, the low odds betting strategy resulted in a net loss of $17, which is a better result than the high odds betting strategy, but still a loss.

In hindsight, I’m actually grateful to the Nepalese government for not allowing gambling. But if gambling is allowed in your country, and let’s not kid ourselves betting is gambling, the low odds betting strategy might be the one for you if you have low risk tolerance. Or if you are the all or nothing type, go for the high odds betting strategy, who knows, it might just work out (no it won’t).

You can view all the data at this link. All the odds data were collected pre game from gg.bet. The game results were collected from twitch.tv and vlr.gg.