Value is a fundamental concept if you want to be a long term winner on Betfair. Basing your betting on whether market odds have positive value - instead of betting on "hunches" or "this horse has been good to me" - is what marks the winners from the losers. Because however you pick your bets, it will be impossible to win every single bet. The idea of value is that because the bets you take have a positive expected value, your wins will more than cover your losses. In a strange way, being a good value bettor, you can be right all the time but not neccessarily win every time.
So the idea of value is that the market odds are somehow mispriced to the true probability of events, so that players are able to take on positive expected values. That is, value is when you are able to get better odds on an event than the chance of the event occuring. For example, if a soccer game had Manchester United at 3.50 but the real odds where somewhere closer to 2.00 then there would be value in backing MU at 3.50. Even if MU lost this match in particular, as long as you were correct in assessing the true odds then it was the correct decision to bet. Making bets with value will lead to your bankroll inevitably growing over the long run.
A more classic illustration of the value concept is the coin flip. The true odds of either heads or tails is 2.0. If you were offered 1.5 odds on heads then there is no value because the offered odds are short of the true odds. If you were betting $100, then you would only win $50 when heads came up and lose $100 on tails. This is a losing long term bet. On the other hand, if you were offered 2.5 on heads, then there is value in taking the bet. You would lose $100 on tails but win $150 on heads. So that your wins would cover your loses. This would be a great long term bet. The idea is to always be in this sort of position.
What if you were offered exactly 2.0 on heads? Any professional value bettor will tell you that the answer is, no bet. Even though the odds are exactly equal to true odds, there is NO VALUE in the bet. Being value concience means that you arn't just looking for when odds are short but specifically looking for good positive value.
So how to identify value? In some way you need to be able turn knowledge into an assessment on probabilities. On one end of the spectrum, it could be deep knowledge about a certain sport that you can feel when odds are off but this only comes after a long career of successfully gambling on a certain sport. While it sounds akin to betting on a "hunch", it is actually more like deep recall. Then there are very technical methods, like using regression modelling of statistics to work out true odds. A little less difficult than econometrics, most successful value bettors use some sort of rating systems. In a rating systems, you assign points for past performance and other attributes and work out the probabilities based on ratings score.
I hope you found this little introduction to the concept of value useful and good luck on your journey. :)
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