  Despite the massive popularity of the Asian Handicap (AH) football (soccer)
betting market, its efficiency has not been adequately studied by the relevant
literature. This paper combines rating systems with Bayesian networks and
presents the first published model specifically developed for prediction and
assessment of the efficiency of the AH betting market. The results are based on
13 English Premier League seasons and are compared to the traditional market,
where the bets are for win, lose or draw. Different betting situations have
been examined including a) both average and maximum (best available) market
odds, b) all possible betting decision thresholds between predicted and
published odds, c) optimisations for both return-on-investment and profit, and
d) simple stake adjustments to investigate how the variance of returns changes
when targeting equivalent profit in both traditional and AH markets. While the
AH market is found to share the inefficiencies of the traditional market, the
findings reveal both interesting differences as well as similarities between
the two.
