In Korea, Odds Making Can Be Lucrative

The three men who make the odds for Sports Toto have an interesting job.

Existing Sports Toto games set payout rates for your winnings automatically according to the rate of people’s bets on a game’s results and scores. Its logic is simple: let bettors compete with each other.

But for fixed-odds games, the issuing company sets the odds beforehand. For example, if Korea wins its match against Croatia on January 29, you win three times your wager; if the game ties, you win four times your wager, and if Korea loses, you win two and a half times your wager. When a bettor wins, the company loses; so the games become contests between gambler and house.

Sports Toto’s gaming rules are similar to those found in Europe, where fixed dividend rate games are mainstream.

It is the duty and the skill of odds makers to attract as many participants to Sports Toto’s games as they can while setting odds so that the house wins money no matter what.

How exactly are winning odds set? An odds maker computes it using as much information as he or she can absorb.

The basic idea of odds making is analyzing team capacities. However, odds maker Yi Won-chae says, “Team analysis merely shows you a general direction like a 25,000:1 scale map. A game is largely influenced not only by a team’s capacity, but also by its morale, injuries, and the general mood of the day.”

Apart from analyzing the game itself, odds makers must also understand public betting tendencies. Fans want their teams to win, so they normally bet on their teams. For example, in British Premier soccer games featuring Manchester United, Korean fans’ betting tendencies clearly shifted after Park Ji-sung joined the team in July 2005.

Last year, Yi received an urgent phone call from an Italian odds maker in April. All of that day’s Italian soccer games were canceled for the following week because of the passing of the Pope. The lesson from this is that you must always pay attention to what goes around you, since such turns of events that influence soccer are all too prevalent.

How does one become an odds maker? One must love sports above all else. If you do not, it will be torturous to stay up all night watching and analyzing games. You also need mathematical and statistical ability to analyze games, not to mention knowledge of foreign languages if you want to analyze data from overseas.

Yi is a man of peculiar background. He earned a master’s degree in quantum mechanics from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) while working as a baseball reporter at a sports paper for two years. Another odds maker, Shim Jong-ho, holds an MBA degree and is an avid follower of NBA basketball. Yi Il-ho worked as a TV commentator who specialized in European soccer while working for a sports-related marketing firm.

As the country’s sports betting market grows larger, the careers prospects of odds makers are better than ever. Hong Jin-ho, a public relations manager at Sports Toto, says, “We intend to offer more fixed-odds games and actively recruit more manpower as we go. Depending on how well odds makers do, a six-figure salary is not so far-fetched.”

Jae-Yun Jung jaeyuna@donga.com