HASBEEN

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Acronym:  Here's Another Spread Betting Entry, Expertly Named.

As primarily a spread bettor for over 20 years, here's my attempt to profit from the football spreads.

Yield, or ROI doesn't easily fit the spread betting format, because unlike tradition betting, a specific risk/reward for each bet is often unknown. In my opinion ROI is also of very limited and/or no value whatsoever with traditional betting strategies either, but maybe that's a topic for another time.

By far the majority of my spread betting, which is also true of other spread betters I know, is as a seller - or going low on the quotes. It is also true in my experience that a successful spread better has more winning bets than losing ones. In the vast majority of cases the spreader who shows a 50% strike rate will be breaking even, any less than that and you'll be a loser long term. My own 20 odd year regime as a spread winner shows me close to 66% strike rate, around 2 wins for every loss.

I need to start with a bankroll. Again, in rough & ready terms for each bet a spread seller can, in the vast majority of cases hope to stay within a win or loss calculated by the width of the spread (e.g. 10-12 would = 2) multiplied by 15. Okay, it can occasionally go outside of these parameters, but we're dealing with unknowns here, and the 15 * spreadwidth should suffice.

In this series I'll be looking at football bookings markets which have a spread width of 4, so my win/loss for each bet @ 1 point would be 60 points.

For bankroll size I'll assume a worst case of an expected 50% strike rate. Using the common Excel formula for longest losing run viz: 500 bets, 0.5 strike rate,  =LN(500)/-LN((1-0.5)))  the result can be rounded up to 9. My starting bankroll will therefore be 60pts * 9 = 540pts.

For each bet in the series I will report profit/loss to 1 point bets, and report this progress as a percentage of the starting bank, NOT each stake in turn, which IMHO will show a far more informative yield on what I needed to start this project.

I've shown profits on other threads on this board, but we'll start with a level playing field here, no profits, no loss, start bank 540pts.

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Saturday 4 November Football Bookings Spreads

Only looking at Sporting Index (SPIN) & Spreadex (SX)
If quote is better with one firm it will be marked, otherwise the quote was the same with both (at the time of writing)

Dortmund v Bayern Munich  SELL @ 43 (SX)
Genoa v Sampdoria   SELL @ 74 (SPIN)
La Coruna v Ath Madrid   SELL @ 54