Early Week 6 Arbitrage Opportunity: Risk-Free Profit on 49ers vs. Browns

One of my favorite ways to make money every football season is through arbitrage betting, because if done properly it’s literally risk-free money.

Sportsbooks set odds independently. They all have different odds, and sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes are so big that you can bet on equal & opposite outcomes on two sportsbooks and make a risk-free profit. That’s arbitrage. You’re essentially day-trading mistakes on sportsbooks to make a risk-free profit.

Here’s an example of an arbitrage bet…

First Half Point Spread: San Francisco 49ers -3.5 | +105 at FanDuel

First Half Point Spread: Cleveland Browns +3.5 | +100 at DraftKings

Here’s a major discrepancy between FanDuel and DraftKings.

Arbitrage opportunities like this are extremely rare across the market considering how many odds are offered.

A tiny percentage of total markets have arbitrage opportunities, but the OddsJam Arbitrage tool can find all of them for you, and shows dozens of opportunities at any given time.

Take a look at the tool below for this example:

As you can see in the screenshot, FanDuel and DraftKings are offering very different odds here.

+105 and +100 sets up an arbitrage opportunity between these two books, where it’s possible to make risk-free profit.

DraftKings limited me to $184.33, so I plugged that into the arbitrage calculator seen below. This calculator pops up when you click the little icon on the left of the tool seen in the first screenshot above.

As you can see, the calculator told me to put $179.83 on FanDuel. I rounded that up to $180.

There are two possibilities here…

1) If the 49ers are up by 4+ at the half I lose $184.33 on DraftKings & win $189 ($180 x 1.05) on FanDuel for a net profit of $4.67

2) If they are up by less than four, tied, or losing, I lose $180 on FanDuel & win $184.33 on DraftKings for a net profit of $4.33.

Either way, I come away with more money than I started with. That’s the beauty of arbitrage betting.

It’s literally impossible for one of the bets to not win. The 49ers are either going to be up by four or more at halftime or they’re not. There’s no in-between.

Arbitrage is rare in the grand scheme of the market, but OddsJam is updating millions of odds every second to point out these risk-free money opportunities when books’ lines get super out of sync with one another.

If you want to learn more about profitable sports betting, then I recommend this strategy guide. It breaks down the top strategies for making money off the sportsbooks.