The national team, with bets against: betting money for their elimination from the World Cup has ceased to be a business

All the imaginary collapsed at the end of the match, but the betting world anticipated the debacle: the combination of algorithms and goals from Saudi Arabia drastically changed the tables on which bettors calculate how much they can win based on his palpitations.

The more a bet pays for an outcome, the more unlikely it is. Conversely, bookmakers give little profit margin to obvious predictions.

Since an Argentine defeat was unlikely in the previous one, major betting houses offered more than 20 times the bet in favor of the Arabs. That is, whoever paid 1,000 got 20,000. It wasn’t a bargain to do it for Argentina: he paid less than 20 cents for each peso played.

Is that according to major betting houses, the odds were 82 percent, against 5 percent for Saudi Arabia. How come? They had not lost their last 36 games, five games without defeat, against only one victory from their rival in their last seven encounters.

Furthermore, after the goal of Lionel Messi He raised the pay for a win in favor of his Argentine rival: it came to be 31 times the bet. The bill was incredible: for every thousand, the bet offered 31 thousand.

That, for those who made the payment before the initial whistle or with Argentina’s partial victory. As the minutes pass, depending on the dynamics of the game, the partial result and other algorithmic seasonings, they made it not so juicy to bet on the bump when things were 2 to 1.

Before the first leg, a catastrophic prediction of elimination in the group stage like the one between Korea and Japan in 2002 paid off a lot: Scaloni’s unbeaten run, America’s Cup and the Final, did not make that possibility probable. Now pays 10 to 1.

If Argentina wins the second game and improves their prospects, the figure will be higher. But if you draw or lose Mexicothat bet will pay off as much as it paid for the win that didn’t happen against Saudi Arabia.

But the algorithms also believe in the possibility of Argentina’s recovery: they still believe that it is unlikely that the team led by Messi will not score in the next matches and that is why the possibility that they finish the World Cup without points pays almost 30 times the bet.

Indeed, the match against Mexico and Poland still has Lionel Scaloni as a candidate. Pay 1.55 and 1.60 to win against each rival.