'Strategies'

[GingerBear]

Hello, So I'm relatively new to sports gambling & I know there is no system, I'm not that stupid :wall I guess I am asking, what's the best way to cover all angles to turn a profit? I am realising horse racing is very, very difficult to call - no matter what prep you do (timeform, iCard, pedigree, conditions... whatever) it doesn't seem to always relate, always a dark horse so doubles and accumulators even on each way can be porked pretty quickly. I am looking at football and I did OK over the weekend, i invested 20 and took out 90 - that to me is good, the 20 was spread betting on the Sunday matches - Everton ruined my joy a bit and City didn't get 3, otherwise it'd been better. I guess the question is, how can I maximise the chances of winning, I've seen the yankee and know that it's not quite so dangerous but the returns would be poor? Is it all just luck or can I potentially minimise the chance a rogue odd occurance? I am only betting small amounts, mainly as I enjoy the thrill but like anyone, I don't like losing! All advice gratefully received. Bear

[Rob]

Re: 'Strategies' Welcome ginger bear, There's a few questions in there and I'm not sure that they can all be answered in one go. I've always believed that unless you're betting at particularly low or high odds then your staking method is largely irrelevant i.e. whether you are using spread bets or accumulators or singles, they are just different versions of the same bets -so a bad bet in a Yankee is still a bad bet in singles. The key is always to find value bets, where your estimate of the odds is better than the odds on offer. Simple really, if you crack that bit, let me know!

[GingerBear]

Re: 'Strategies' Cheers for the response Rob, I get what you're saying. I meant for instance in a game of football, you have 3 outcomes - they are finite: Like, for instance: Team A Team B W L D D L W If Team A was Man Utd and Team B West Brom, a draw & a win for WBA are going to return greater than Team A, if you have a potential spend of £30.00 and the odds were 1.95 for Man Utd, 3.6 for a draw or 4.2 for a WBA win... you'd want to split that bet up, not equally. So, as Man utd are likely to win you'd put perhaps £14 on, a draw £10 and a loss £6.00 - does that make sense? I mean that's a really basic example with made up odds but, you wouldn't get rich quick but you can't really lose if your stake is matched to the odds (if it has a small amount of outs). Is this just dutching?

[Rob]

Re: 'Strategies' If you're talking about backing each outcome so that you're guaranteed a return, then you're basically talking about arbitrage. There are websites dedicated to this but opportunities are very hard to come by

[lunatism]

Re: 'Strategies'

Hello, So I'm relatively new to sports gambling & I know there is no system, I'm not that stupid :wall

Aha, but dear GingerBear there are system(s), there just isn't THE system, not to my knowledge at least, no universal idea that can be transferred between sports, although i've been working on an idea that seems to work between basketball, rugby and football (seems to, impossible to backtest, everything "seems to" work in the long term!). If you want to minimise your chances of picking losers from the sea of winners, try laying ;) Find a match where you are confident of a home win or an away win, if the odds of laying the favourite are under 3.00, lay. Obviously, these chances won't be falling out of the sky, but once you've built up your speciality, you may find that you spot these kind of games with delightful regularity. Damn my memory and dislike of searching the forums for things, i'm pretty sure I wrote in a thread (at some point in my life) about a whole series of variables that one should (or could) take into account when betting on football matches in order to rule out those "woops" games (let's call Man Utd-Everton 4-4 one of those, not many saw UTD not winning that game, especially with what is on the line for them at the moment). If i can find it, i'll let you know, but basically, the more effort you put in, the more you will get out. Before i went all crazy in Excel, i used to spend hours doing research before touching games, and from my personal experience, there is no easy/simple quick fix to successful betting, it's all about patience and knowledge - the more you acquire, the better placed you are to be successful! Hmmm, looks rather like i've not answered your implied question about staking...ah well, another time perhaps :ok