Gambling Strategies and Prize-Pricing Recommendation in Sports Multi-Bets

A sports multi-bet is a bet on the results of a set of N games. One type of multi-bet offered by the Israeli government is WINNER 16, where participants guess the results of a set of 16 soccer games. The prizes in WINNER 16 are determined by the accumulated profit in previous rounds, and are split among all winning forms. When the reward increases beyond a certain threshold, a profitable strategy can be devised. Here, we present a machine-learning algorithm scheme to play WINNER 16. Our proposed algorithm is marginally profitable on average in a range of hyper-parameters, indicating inefficiencies in this game. To make a better prize-pricing mechanism we suggest a generalization of the single-bet approach. We studied the expected profit and risk of WINNER 16 after applying our suggestion. Our proposal can make the game more fair and more appealing without reducing the profitability.