With so many betting markets and terms out there, it’s easy to get a little lost in the terminology. The concept of an outright bet isn’t difficult to understand though, it is just a bet on a team or player to win a certain tournament or competition, or to be the top ‘x’ in that tournament or competition.
Examples of an outright bet might be “Man City to win the Premier League”, “Daniil Medvedev to win the French Open”, or “Jon Rahm to win the PGA Tour”.
Equally, you might be able to bet on things like the top scorer, team to be relegated, to make the play offs, the winning region in the NFL, etc. It depends on the sport as to what might be available.
Basically though, an outright bet is a longer term prediction rather than a bet on which team will win a specific match, or what the score of a fixture will be.
You can think of it as a much broader bet on a season or competition that ignores the details along the way and is only concerned with the ultimate result.
A bookmaker will offer odds before the competition or tournament begins based on the team or players’ previous form compared with their opponents, and will then adjust those odds as the tournament goes on. However, you secure the odds you take when you make the bet, so getting in early before new information comes to light is the way to lock in longer odds if that’s what you are looking for.
Are Outright Markets the Same as Futures Markets?
They are and they aren’t.
Outright markets such as the winner of the Premier League, for example, will be made available before the season commences, which technically makes them a futures market in a way, but you can also bet on them when the season is well underway.
That said, outright markets will often be closed at some point before a season or competition ends, even if it is some time after the half way point.
Futures is a term that can also be applied to a horse race that is happening in a few days’ time, for instance, but you wouldn’t consider a bet on the winner of a race two days away as an outright betting market, because it is just a single race.
Confusingly, you do sometimes find outrights by navigating through the ‘Futures’ tab on bookies websites though, so the terms are sometimes incorrectly used interchangeably. In an online bookmakers case this is more to do with ease of navigation and access to markets than anything else though.
Are Outright Bets a Good Idea?
They can be if you think a bookmaker has got their numbers wrong. Another time they are useful is if you want to bet on an underdog, whether just for fun or because you genuinely think they have been overlooked.
The ultimate example of this is when Leicester won the Premier League in the 2015/16 season. The outright odds of them winning before the season began were 5000/1, but obviously as the competition went on and they won matches those odds shortened dramatically.
Just 2 months after the season began the best odds on Leicester were 1500/1, and a month later they were at the top of the league at odds of 100/1, and by April they were at 1/20. An outright bet of a quid pre-season, just for a bit of a laugh, would have returned £5k.
Each way outrights are also a possibility, and these can be used to great effect in sports like golf, where many players start with long odds but have decent chances of placing even if their chances of winning look slim.
Outright bets are popular because they give a lot of entertainment value, as in the bet stays alive for a fairly long time, and they are also very easy to make. There is only so much research you can do into an outside bet because a lot will happen between the point at which the bet is made and when the eventual winner is decided, so it’s a bet that doesn’t require too much effort.
