Boring 0-0 Draw? Get your Money Back

Like many sports punters, I have my preferred bookmakers depending on the event type. For example I prefer Betfair for financial betting and Sports Alive for multibets. Now bet365 is emerging as my favourite bookmaker for football betting, thanks to its refund feature in the event of a 0-0 draw.

With bet365 all pre-match Correct Score, Half-Time/Full-Time and Scorecast bets on a soccer match are refunded if you have a losing bet and the match ends 0-0.

So what are the odds of a 0-0 draw? I’ve tried to dig up some statistics on how many matches end 0-0, but I’ve struggled to find anything. Looking at this season’s English Championship league, 23 of the last 300 matches ended 0-0. This is roughly 7.7% of the fixtures. For the English Premier League I found 15 draws in the last 200 matches, which equates to 7.5% of the fixtures. Having said all this a lot more data is required to ascertain the actual odds of a 0-0 draw. Looking at Betfair, the typical odds for a 0-0 draw are 10.5, implying a 9.5% probability of occurring.

I have compared the bet365 odds to those of other bookmakers and they appear to be very similar. The odds don’t appear to be adjusted downward to compensate bet365 for the refund feature. For this reason the 0-0 refund policy makes bet365 great value for football betting.