Before you place any bets this weekend, we wanted to share with you our 8 Top Football Betting Tips for improve your bet (as put forward by a variety of punting experts) to help you bash the bookies.
Each tip has been compiled with the help of tipster monitoring service Secret Betting Club.
To improve your customer experience with us, IO BET only uses cookies which will improve your experience with us amd will not interfere with your privacy. Strategy is critical if you want to increase your odds of winning. The first time you play roulette, the players sprinkling the layout with chips may look as if they’re heaping pepperoni slices on a pizza. You can make many different bets as long as you stay within the table’s maximum limits.
How to improve your football betting:
Don’t Bet On What’s Popular
Doing what everyone else is doing can often be a pointless exercise and some would go as far as suggesting that you can’t make money in the long run backing “popular” bets. It might be psychologically re-assuring to read lots of people agreeing with a bet you fancy, but in reality the fact that lots of people want to back something means you are unlikely to be getting a value price.
There’s a reason most bookies list their top 10 most popular bets on their homepage. Be your own person, learn to truly ignore what everyone else is saying and don’t be afraid to go as far against the grain as you find comfortable to go.
Bet With A Sound Staking Plan
We know of nobody who bets seriously and doesn’t follow a suitable staking plan. It’s a must to keep your staking sensible and to use a set strategy – not least as it will help you ride out the inevitable losing runs that will come your way! It can also help rein you in if you get carried away during a purple patch of winners. Remember, you can get carried away during a losing run, but you can also get carried away during a winning run.
Avoid Bets Where The Market Offers No Value
Checking out the margins on any given book is another bit of sage advice and we suggest avoiding any bet in a market that doesn’t have a minimum of a 97% book. If the bookies are taking a big cut you’ve got to beat them just to breakeven.
Focus Away From The Big Markets
Every man and his dog knows about the top sides in all the major leagues and so the further down the football pyramid you go, the greater your chances of finding a value bet are.Many football tipping experts focus on lower leagues for this exact reason with one of the best football brains we know betting only on non-league football. Take top football tipster Jeremy Price for example, he barely bets on the top five leagues as he finds value where the bookies aren’t looking.
Become A Master of A Few Leagues, Not A Jack of All!
If you can also specialise your betting in just a handful of leagues (especially lower leagues), then it can also help you keep one step ahead of the bookies. Hone in on one or two leagues and stick to them. Get to know each side well using club websites and forums (great for getting ‘insider’ info on things like injuries and suspensions) and the chances are you will know more than the bookies before long!Football tipster Christopher Silenoshas made great profits from backing the draw, a bet that most tipsters ignore!
Price Up Your Bet Before You Check The Odds
Improve Your Bottom Line
Before picking out a football bet, many experts recommend that you price up a betting market yourself before looking at the actual odds available. This helps give you the best possible chance of forming an unbiased opinion. Try doing this across a league or game where you have an interest and see what sticks out as a value bet once you check the odds!
Of course if you don’t have time to do this, Bet Advisor’s Senior and Junior tipsters are there to find the bargains for you!
Bet with a Minimum Value Threshold
Tipsters will often provide suggested odds, but you have to know when not to chase a bet down.
Here’s an example of why this is so important: If you expect to make 10% ROI when backing a team at 4.00 (3/1), what happens if you place your bet at 3.50 (5/2)?
If you place your bet at 3.50, your profit expectation has gone! You’re looking at a long-term loss of -3.75% instead of a profit of 10%.
If you placed your bet at 3.75, you’d be looking at a potential profit of +3.13%.
Bet @ 4.00: Profit = 10%
Bet @ 3.75: Profit = 3.13%
Bet @ 3.50: Loss = -3.75%
There is a sliding scale of diminishing returns so remember price is everything! Resist the urge to bet regardless of the price and only bet if the odds are still sufficiently in your favour.
Place Accumulators As ‘Fun’ Bets Only
This last point is a controversial one, but in our experience accumulators are very poor value bets and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. There is a good reason the bookies constantly push them on punters – they very rarely come in and they only serve to swell their coffers.
Although the attractions of bagging a big acca are obvious – don’t be fooled into thinking they are anything but a bit of fun and treat them as such.
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This guide attempts to answer the hardest question in gambling which is how do I win money? Millions of us around the world make sports bets on a weekly basis. Some people do this purely for recreation and have no expectation of ever winning money, however most are in it to win some cash.
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I think apart from some very unlucky people most find that some bets win and some bets lose. Again from this group most find that they lose over time and the bookies win, so why is this?
Well it all comes down to price. If we assume that a sporting event is not fixed then all gamblers have to approach the event thinking that any result is possible. You should never look at a fixture and assume a result, you don’t know what will happen and neither does the Bookmaker.
However the Bookmaker believes that he knows roughly what the probabilities are for each possible outcome, so if Arsenal are 50% likely to beat Liverpool at home then the actual price required is 2.0.
The Bookmaker needs to make money so they will typically price them at 10/11 or 1.909 in decimals. So if you make 10 bets of £10 each on a Saturday all about 2.0 then probability suggests that 5 will win and 5 will lose. That’s fine if you got 2.0 as you will get back the £100 you started with, however if you have taken 10/11 then you will only get back £95.45.
Even betting on consistent winners like Roger Federer can lose you money in the long run
So if you want to start making money from gambling then you have to stop making betting decisions on what you think will happen, you don’t know! Start making them based on price.
So how do you as an individual determine the true probability and so price of an event? If you have a maths degree from a decent university then you can try and build your own model, however this is unnecessary as the work has been done for you by Betfair.
The money or liquidity available on Betfair is on the whole generated from very large gamblers with very sophisticated pricing models. These professional enterprises spend huge amounts of money on models and information to accurately determine the true probability and so price of each outcome. If they discover an incorrect price they invest heavily. This has the effect of changing the exchange price dramatically. The new exchange price then represents the correct probability of a result happening.
So if you want to make money from gambling you need to back at a higher price with the Bookmakers than is available at that point in time on the exchanges. So in our example if your 10 selections are all 10/11 at the Bookmakers but the exchange price is actually 1.87, then across the 10 matches you would expect to make money rather than losing it.
You can apply this central principle in three main ways:
Take the top price on your chosen selection
If you fancy Arsenal to beat Liverpool and want to bet that way because you want to watch the game then make sure you take the top price. The difference between top and bottom price can be as much as 30%, no matter how good your instincts are you cannot give away 30% and hope to win.
This means you should open an account with all the Bookmakers on an affiliate website – a favourite of mine is FootyTips365, and review the odds offered by each on a site like Odds Checker so that you can always get the top price on your chosen selection.
Remember to only use Bookies who are credible firms and who actually pay out; they must have history and a UK Gambling licence. I'd advise you not to use firms without these characteristics.
The odds of any outcome, such as Eden Hazard scoring a goal, can vary wildly from Bookie to Bookie
Bet on whatever offers value
This is the best way of making money. A quick run through on a Saturday at 9.00am will show you several examples just on the Premier League where the Bookmakers are a bigger price than Betfair. If you go through every match in every league and every horse race there are hundreds daily.
Bet no more than 5% of your bank on each selection as they will not all win, however over the month you are extremely likely to be winning money. It is possible that everything will lose its just the probabilities are in your favour.
The smaller you bet as a percentage of your bank the more the maths moves in your favour, if you have £100 and only bet £1 a game then over £100 bets you should be up, if you only do 2 bets of £50 each then although the odds are in your favour you could easily lose both bets. Once you choose your bank and staking plan stick with it as if all your bets are arbs you will win money over time.
Place an arbitrage bet or 'sure bet'
The advantage of doing a value bet is that you do not have to pay exchange commission. However if you do not want to take any risk then you can place a lay bet on the exchange so that you win whatever happens.
So for example you could bet £1,000 on United at 2.0 and then lay that off at 1.9 for £1,000 you will make £100 less comm if United win, if you use Betdaq then this is only 2%. The disadvantage is that you end up making twice as many bets and the admin becomes greater. However if you do larger stakes then you can make very good money in this way.
How To Improve Your Betting
On a totally separate note the author of this article has just released his first game in the App store, its totally free and if you are a fan of Retro Games or Football nostalgia then you will enjoy this trip down memory lane.