Win Both Halves: Expected vs Recorded results

Bookiebashing models Win Both Halves (as well as all other goals markets) in-house using the Game Centre tool. The data here can be used to exploit edges both at bookmakers and exchanges.

Win Both Halves has always been a divisive calculation at bookiebashing – because it is sometimes different to the prices available on the exchange. A blog here was written in 2022 to address some concerns on the ROI of Win Both Halves bets at the time:

Blog post – ROI of 1,000 Win both Halves bets

Questions still remain on the validity of the calculation. Recently on the forum a member posted our WBH fair odds in a match and asked “Nobody believes this, do they?”. Today a support ticket asked us to investigate the poor ROI of Win Both Halves. 

In this blog we look at the expected vs recorded results for favourites to Win Both Halves in a sample size of significance. The data used in this analysis is open to everyone on the Data Archive Tools where we log the bookiebashing line of every match we model, and provide the HT and FT results aswell.

  1. If you go to Tools > Data Archive – Bulk Download Markets you can download the bookiebashing lines for WIn Both Halves for over 100,000 matches.
  2. If you go to Tools > Data Archive – Historical Scores and Scorers you can get all half time and full time scores.

We analysed the performance of 3,649 favourites  – all matches in the the top 4 European Leagues and top 4 English League between Jan 2021 and Dec 2023. 

  • The Fair Odds expect a favourite to Win Both Halves 586 times. 
  • The recorded results show that a favourite Won Both Halves 578 times.

We will leave it to the user to decide on the accuracy of that outcome. A spreadsheet of this data can be downloaded here: