Betting probability - part 2 - unconditional, conditional and joint probability

Betting probability is yet another must master skill that you got to hammer into your brain neurons one way or another. As usual Howtobet.net aims to break this relatively heavy and academically thought out terminology down to more folksy and easy to grasp language. To support this we use simple betting related examples. Let's get to work:

Unconditional betting probability

Unconditional betting probability refers to a probability that is not conditioned on anything. It simply is the probability of an event occurring or not.

Example of unconditional probability in betting

Let the probability of A written as P(A) be the probability that Manchester City will beat Manchester United in the English Premier League in one match up at Old Trafford. As you can see there are no conditions attached to this probability.

Conditional betting probability

If the probability you are after is depending on another probability you are dealing with conditional probability.

Example of conditional probability in betting

Imagine you make a bet that PSG will win three games in a row in the French top soccer league. Here, you can intuitively see that in order for win two to occur the first match must have been a winner. In order for the third bet to be interesting, game number two must have yielded a win too. Here it is easy to see what we mean by “conditional”.

Joint probability

As you can imagine joint probability refers to the likelihood of two or more events happening together. This is denoted as P(AB), and that simply means the probability (P) of (A and B) happening.

Example of joint probability in betting

This one is a classic; we are dealing with an accumulator (parlay) here.  Say you want to bet on this treble: Tottenham Hotspur to win in the English Premier League against Everton, The Lakers to win in a NBA fixture against the Sacramento Kings and that Sweden gets more points than Norway in the Eurovision Song contest. This can be denoted as P of (Spurs win AND Lakers win AND Sweden win)

What’s coming up and what went down

In the next article we focus on the rules of Multiplication. This may sound all professor geeky and scary, but it is fairly simple so don't lose sleep over it. You also know we will do our utmost to break it down in a very simple way as well.

If you havent read our introduction to probability you should do so right about now. In general; read our previous betting probability articles here:

Introduction to betting probability

Rules of multiplication in probability