What is a Correct Score bet?
Correct Score bets are available on a number of sports and events. While it’s especially popular in football, the Correct Score market can be available for other sports, such as ice hockey and baseball. However, almost every bookmaker you’ll come across will offer this market on major and minor football matches. For this reason, we’re going to concentrate on how Correct Score betting works in football in this guide.
So, what exactly is a Correct Score bet? Essentially, a Correct Score bet is where you place a wager on the final score of a specific game, that is, the actual scoreline when the referee blows the full time whistle. Generally, the Correct Score is based on 90 minutes play (including injury time), in other words if a game was to go on to extra time, this wouldn’t count towards the success or failure of your bet.
You’ll notice that the odds on Correct Score bets tend to be longer than other markets, such as Match Result, Both Teams To Score and Total Goals. This is because it can be really difficult to predict a correct scoreline, they’re much tougher to call correctly than a bet on if both teams will score or not, or if there will be over 2.5 goals in a game, for example.
To demonstrate this, we analysed the odds on the English Premier League fixture between Liverpool and Arsenal. You can view our research in the table below.
| Correct Score 2-1 | Correct Score 1-2 | Both Teams To Score Yes | Total Goals Over 2.5 |
|---|
| 7.0 | 9.5 | 1.70 | 1.85 |
As the table above shows, the odds on a 2-1 victory, for both sides, are much longer than the odds on a BTTS bet and a Total Goals wager. It’s important to remember, though, that correctly predicting the score of a match is much harder than predicting if both teams will find the back of the net or if there will be over a specific amount of goals scored.
Some bookmakers offer the Combination Correct Score market, where you can choose from correct score goal bands. This gives you more room for error, but the odds can be drastically reduced.
For example, from the table above we can see our operator is offering odds of 7.0 for Liverpool to beat Arsenal 2-1. Our bookmaker also offers a Correct Score Group Betting option, which allows us to bet on Liverpool to win 2-1, 3-1 or 4-1. This gives us much more room for error, but our odds have dropped from 7.0 to 5.5.
If you’re looking for longer odds, you might consider the Half-Time Correct Score market. Again, a difficult market to call correctly, but the increase in odds can potentially present excellent betting value.
Take a look at the table below, where we’ve compared the Half-Time Correct Score and Full-Time Correct Score markets on the Serie A fixture between Roma and Bologna.
| HT 2-1 | FT 2-1 | HT 1-2 | FT 1-2 |
|---|
| 23.0 | 8.5 | 29.0 | 12.0 |
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