Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a sport that has exploded in recent decades, with prestigious competitions such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), spearheading the sport into the mainstream and attracting millions of fans around the world.
It’s no wonder then that in recent years MMA has become an extremely popular sport for savvy sports bettors looking to make a profit across betting markets within the sport. A quick look at the one of the larger sports betting websites Scs.ie shows that MMA is in the top 4 most bet on sports.
In this article, we’ll talk about things to watch out for when betting on MMA and how you can minimize your risk when looking for profitable value bets.
Understand what you’re betting on
This goes without saying, but if you’re not an experienced MMA bettor then you need to become especially familiar with the different types of MMA bets that feature across MMA markets.
Here are the most common:
To win
The most straightforward, you’re betting on which fighter will win the contest. Otherwise known as moneyline markets (though this is more common to North American sportsbooks than Irish ones).
Method of victory
This one might represent opportunistic edges if you study the particular fighters in great detail because some will have consistent tactics and strategies that they often use in fights. Generally, the outcomes are categorised like this:
- By decision or technical decision
- By KO (knockout), TKO (technical knockout), or DQ (disqualification)
- By submission (i.e. the other fighter taps out)
Round betting
Which fighter will win that particular round?
Fighter strikes landed
Self-explanatory, what is the minimum number of strikes that your chosen fighter will land on their opponent? Again, this will depend on your chosen fighter’s style.
Study the form
Fundamentally, you study the form of your fighters if you’re looking to extract value from the betting markets.
For example, on 20th October Anthony Hernandez takes on Michel Pereira at UFC Fight Night.
The markets are relatively even, with Hernandez as the slight favourite at around 8/11, and Pereira 11/10.
When looking at the form, we see that Hernandez has won his last 5 fights, with 3 out of those 5 being from submission. What to do with this information? We could take a look at the method of victory market and compare what the implied probability of submission is, versus our assessment having looked at the form.
The formula for working out implied probability (from fractional) is:
denominator / (denominator + numerator) * 100
Michel Pereira has also won his last 5 fights with two of those arising from submission.
Hypothesizing our probability is a complex task and since not all fighters are of equal ability, it requires more thinking than blindly creating probabilities from the data alone.
The takeaway here is that form is not binary, and in order to truly extrapolate what the probability of an outcome is, we need a lot more data points within our model, or we need to study the form at an extremely deep level.
Bankroll
The most essential part of minimizing your risk across any sport is managing your bankroll sensibly and MMA betting is no different in this regard.
If you are betting casually, this might just be having a limited amount of bets that you allow yourself to wager every week and sticking to it.
For the serious punter though, a sensible bankroll should be set aside for using to bet with. A general rule for when betting is limiting individual bets to a small percentage of your bankroll of around 3-5%. So for a 1000 euro bankroll, you would bet no more than 50 euros.
A more scientific approach is using a sophisticated staking formula such as the Kelly Criterion. The Kelly Criterion takes your bankroll, and your assessed edge (i.e. the odds on offer vs your own assessment of probability) and provides you with the optimum stake for that wager.
The drawback of using something like the Kelly Criterion is that you need to be very confident in your assessment of such an edge.