Is football betting, betting on luck?

[Maxi Stavros]

Is football betting, betting on luck and if so is the answer to being successful to follow lots of different tipsters and place the bets of tipsters who are currently running hot?

Is football betting, betting on luck? What I mean by that is it in reality no different to placing a bet on red/black on a roulette spin. You get the odds of Evens and the outcome is random based on red being 18/37 = 48.6% chance, black being 48.6% chance and zero being 2.8% chance. It is no different from having 1000 balls in a bag, 486 being red, 486 being black and 28 zeros and pulling one out and seeing if you have won based on what you bet on.

Football betting seems a really well disguised way of betting on luck. Take the first match of the Premier League season - Newcastle v Aston Villa. At the time of writing this on the exchanges Newcastle are 1.75 to win, Aston Villa are 5.2 and the draw is 4.0. In percentage terms, this is Newcastle = 57.1%, Villa = 19.2% and the draw is 25%. I think those odds seem very accurate. One may think Newcastle will win this, they have a quality team and playing at home they should win. Yes they should, 57.1% means that on average they will win this match more times than not winning if it was played 100 times. But the reality is, the outcome is random, any of these results can happen, and the odds make the outcome the same as having 1013 balls in a bag, 571 are Newcastle win, 192 are Villa win and 250 are draw. If you were to pull a ball out it could easily be any outcome and if you picked a ball out 1000 times you should in theory be even. If the odds are set accurately then there is no way you can profit long term unless you are running well and have been lucky.

Why is football betting so hard to make long term profits on? I love football and my knowledge is excellent as I love it so much, but in 20 years of betting and trying so many different strategies I have never found a way to make long terms profits. I have followed tipsters and recorded their results and hardly any are profitable long term and isn't the reason for that because the odds are so perfectly set and with sportsbooks there is a margin in the bookies favour, on the exchanges there is commission and therefore with the odds so accurate it is not possible to make long term profits. 

From my experience of football betting, I hit hot patches and cold patches. Sometimes I literally cannot win a bet and I don't understand why when each match is out of my control. Whereas at times I hit real amazing hot streaks where I literally cannot lose a bet. I recorded 1000 bets I placed on BTTS. My best winning period was when I won 18 of 25 bets with average odds of 1.95. My worst period was losing 20 of 25 bets at average odds of 1.88. How can you go from picking 72% winners to 20% winners when picking using the same sort of strategy?  

So back to my original point, if to be profitable you need to be lucky and running well, is the best way to make money to follow many tipsters and place the bets of those running hot and then switching between tipsters constantly based on their form?

 

[harry_rag]

16 hours ago, Maxi Stavros said:

Is football betting, betting on luck

Any reason to single out football over other sports? I'd say they're all broadly similar including racing although football punters benefit from an abundance of relevant statistics compared to some other sports. Racing is broadly in the same boat but differs slightly (in the way it's so centered around and dependent on betting for its very existence).

16 hours ago, Maxi Stavros said:

is the answer to being successful to follow lots of different tipsters and place the bets of tipsters who are currently running hot?

No, definitely not, that's a quick route to depleting your bankroll. You'll end up missing the wedding and going to the funeral as the saying goes as you'll start backing a tipster already on a "hot" streak just in time for their luck to even out. If you must follow tipsters (not a popular angle on here) rather than find your own bets then you'd be better off doing due diligence and following a portfolio of tipsters with a proven long term profitable track record and sticking with them through the occasional bad spell. (Even the most profitable systems/strategies can have long losing runs that test the resolve of the most seasoned punter.)