singles vs combos

[Guest przeszczepan]

First of all, sorry for my poor English. I am not a native speaker. I am interested in betting strategy and this forum is the place with by far the best information on this topic. There is an issue which has been bothering me for a long time now but I couldn't find anybody who could explain the matter to me. The question is: If I have a positive yield on flat betting on singles, why shouldn't I make combos of the value bets I spot? You obviously know that it would dramatically increase my yield( example: you estimate the fair odds for an outcome to be 2. A bookmaker is offering odds of 2.1. You get an edge of 5%. If you combine two bets like this you receive fair odds at 4 and the bookmaker offering 4.41 so your edge is 10,25%, for 3 bets in a combo you have as much as 15,8% and so on...)Where is the catch? It looks like an easy way to pump the yield which is extremely difficult to achieve in any other way. Can anybody point the disadvantages? The few I know are: 1. You are forced to use only one bookmaker so you are not able to choose the best odds. On the other hand, making combos is the same as betting on the second game the money won on the first one. Therefore the problem is solved unless the games are played simultaneously( what a difficult word you have!). 2. The odds increase so, as Joe once wrote: "the longer the odds you bet, the more bets you should have to smooth out the profit growth, i.e. making it less risky". Still, is this slight increase in risk not worth the huge( 5% is huge, isn't it?) increase in yield? 3. You make less bets. It can be solved by putting games in combinations like 2 out of 5 for example, which gives you 10 bets instead of 5. I may be terribly wrong here but I am only at the begging of my adventure with statistics (as I am in highschool yet) so, please, forgive the naivety. I would be grateful if anybody could prove me wrong and let me sleep calmly.

[Joe]

Re: singles vs combos I'd second all that. You need to be sure that you have your edge in each selection, otherwise the overround starts to work against you. To reduce the risk to the bank due to the longer odds I'd also suggest a smaller stake size, which of course reduces profit potential, but then everything's a trade-off in betting.