£10 into £2000 in 365 days

Had a shot off the woodwork as well, smashing the stats, 66% possession after 20 mins.

 

1-1, home teams first shot on target for 35 mins ffs

 

Levadia now losing. Have to win by 3 or more so need to score at least 4 goals with 35 mins left.

 

That's just absurd. Literally speechless.

 

Balance: £11.12

Happy with the results today, good win for Watford and a close win for Lyon (semi wish i’d done 1-0 correct score prediction as I said i’d expect a similar score to the first leg!) sees us in profit for the day and back on track!

Day 7:

Champions League Qualifiers Zulte Waregem v PSV
07-08-2013 19:45
Win-Draw-Win
PSV @ 3/4

Stake: 75p

Can’t believe the price for this game, I think PSV were 2/9 to win the home leg, and they did quite comfortably (2-0). PSV played a strong squad, including players that really impressed me at the recent U21 Euros (Maher + Wijnaldum in particular). I reckon they’ll play an equally strong squad here and go for an away goal or 2 just to guarantee the win. Zulte Waregem have made a good start to the season (winning 2/2) and don’t have a bad squad (which includes Eden Hazards brother), but the Dutch league is superior in every aspect to the Belgian league, and I’d expect another 1-0 or 2-0 win to PSV.

Champions League Qualifiers Elfsborg v Celtic
07-08-2013 18:45
Win-Draw-Win
Elfsborg @ 8/5

Stake 50p

I’ve watched back the entirety of the first leg in research for this bet as I thought Elfsborg really represented value as there’s some advantages that I think the bookies have overlooked. In the first leg Elfsborg were VERY defensive, shutting down Celtic whenever they got the ball, they did it admirably, for the most part, except falling asleep for the only goal of the game (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqr7-UQMiCk - terrible defending, both by the centre back and the full back). I believe that Elfsborg set-up like this to restrict damage in the first leg, and try to win the game in the 2nd leg. Having watched Elfsborg a lot over the last season, I also think they can get a result here. Their home record is immense, having lost just 1 in their last 10 games, and scoring an amazing 26 goals in the last 10 home games in all competitions. They also have a huge advantage over Celtic, and I think the bookies might not have taken this into equation when pricing up Elfsborg - they play on astroturf. Because of this, the ball rolls and bounces a little differently than on grass, not by much because it’s pretty much the best astroturf available, but it’s certainly different to grass, the Elfsborg players will be a lot more comfortable playing on this surface than the Celtic players will. My only concern is that Elfsborg will be a little more attacking and could be vulnerable to the counter-attack, especially since Celtic will go through if Elfsborg don’t score, so are more likely to sit deep. But for the odds, it’s certainly worth a medium stake on the Elfsborg win.

 

PSV are now 4/6 to win.

 

And Elfsborg are 7/4.

 

Aye, PSV have shortened. But Elfsborg have drifted, so as long as both come in, they should balance out!

 

Elfsborg so close to scoring!

 

and a clear cut penalty not given a few minutes after

 

Pooooo

 

Awful ref.

 

Zulte down to 10 men

 

1 - 0 to PSV!

 

Day 8:

Balance: £11.18

Another profitable day yesterday (albeit only 6p), Elfsborg were shocking at their shooting, 12 shots off target according to the stats! Should have had a clear cut penalty as well, were much the better team than Celtic were. Ah well, onto tomorrow!

Europa League Qualifiers Udinese v Nk Siroki Brijeg
08-08-2013 19:45
To Win Both Halves
Udinese @ 10/11

Stake: 75p

2nd leg of the first bet we placed in the group, this is the only value I could find. I’d initially planned for Udinese to win to nil at 8/11 but upon checking that has now significantly dropped in price and is too risky for the returns. The Udinese manager has said that he is wary of any shocks and will most likely play the same team that won the first leg 3-1.



Europa League Qualifiers Malmo v Swansea
08-08-2013 18:45
Win-Draw-Win
Swansea @ evens

Stake: 40p

Swansea demolished Malmo 4-0 in the first leg, with some excellent play by Swanseas new signing Bony. I imagine Swansea will play a mix of fringe first team players with some of the new additions (Bony + Pozuelo I reckon will both start). They’ll look to keep a clean sheet here and probably won’t be too attacking, but the way that Swansea play football is meant both to keep the number of goals conceded down whilst creating the most attacking chances, and i’m sure they’ll grab a goal or 2, a good value bet here.

 

Also asked the Facebook group if they'd like a weekly writeup with general betting advice and a recap of our bets, response was very favourable so here's an essay pretty much:


Right, there was a lot of people interested in the weekly write up I suggested the other day, so now day 7 is over, here it is, I got a bit carried away with writing it as you’ll see, but hopefully it’ll be useful to a lot of you!

We’re currently sitting on a balance of 11.18, which may not seem like much of a profit at these sort of stakes, but that’s an increase of over 11% from our starting bank, which certainly isn’t too bad after just one week, I would have liked to have been a little bit higher, but day 5 was a kick in the teeth and screwed us up a bit, but these days happen and 6 days of profit out the week is decent. We’re currently also sitting on a ROI (return on investment) of 13%, which is also not too shabby, most professional gamblers aim for an ROI of 10% and the worlds most successful sports gambler has an ROI of 16%. Hopefully we can carry on the good form into week 2, if you want to see my theory on sports betting and my methodology for picking bets, see below...

I strongly believe that you don’t actually need to know a whole lot about football to profit from betting, as I’ve said on here before, I maintain that profiting from betting in the long-term depends on 4 things, all nicely divided up into quarters. The first quarter is good bets + knowledge, these certainly help, but actually aren’t essential if you choose the right sort of markets to bet on. Most leagues have their little traits, that once you know them, make betting on them a whole lot easier. English football is very bad to bet on for instance, as there’s so much quality in every team, that any team can beat any team for the most part, and there’s no set pattern. However the Finnish premier league usually ends up in a very low scoring game (usually a win is only by a single goal), and the home team rarely loses. Because of this you get some great odds for the most part, and they’re usually worth the risk!
The next quarter is probably the most important out of the 4, and that’s money management. Carefully planned stakes can ensure damage limitation; on days when there’s 2 bets, I make sure that the bet I feel stands the best chance of winning has the highest stake, and that the secondary bet’s stake is low enough that if the first bet wins and the second bet loses, I still end up in profit for the day. If the main bet loses and the secondary bet wins, then chances are you’ll end up down for the day, but only by 1 or 2% of the betting bank, which is an acceptable loss. The only trouble comes if both lose, then you tend to lose about 7-8% of the bank, which still isn’t a disaster, but you need to be consistent with the staking (I stake no more than 5% of my total betting bank on a single bet, this ensures damage limitation!)
Discipline is the next quarter, it’s very easy to get carried away, and decide to double up or treble up or even accumulator up on games that you’re very confident on, or to stake slightly more than 5% on a bet, whilst this is fine when betting small amounts, it’s quite a risk when you move on to staking hundreds on a single bet, which is why when placing a bet, I treat every bet the same, whether its for 75p or £75. If you wouldn’t place the same bet with £100, don’t do it with £1 or £10!
The last quarter is luck. You can have a dead cert bet by statistics, but you still need the team to put the ball in the back of the net, and absolutely anything can happen in football, this sorta links in with the money management + discipline side as well, you could have a great bet, but then the team you’ve bet on gets someone sent off and a penalty given against them in the first 5 minutes, that would leave it in a very bad place, so by staying disciplined with the stakes you can keep the advantage on your side rather than chancing.

When it comes to actually finding and placing bets, I have a method I follow for finding all my bets:

1: Before even opening a bookies website, I look at www.soccerway.com
2: From here I look through the leagues I’m comfortable with betting on, and open all the fixtures in those leagues in new tabs
3: I have a browse through recent form, have a look at the table and decide if there’s a potential bet there. If a team has improved a lot from the season before, I attempt to investigate why (such as a new player etc)
4: Then I head to the bookies site and check the prices. 4/6 is the lowest price I take. If the price is lower than this for the win, i’ll investigate handicaps and see if I think they’ll be able to make the handicap. Usually I go for odds that are around evens, as that way you only need to get 51% or more of the bets right to profit.
5: Place the bet!

This ensures that i’m not tempted by the odds the bookies have set, and keeps me disciplined as it makes sure that I’m finding the bets, rather than me seeing the odds and thinking “that’s good”.

I’ll have a quick re-cap of some of the bets I’d like to look back on. I’ll start with the under 4.5 goal accumulators, we’ve done 2 of those so far and both have lost which is rather unlucky, as usually these have only lost about 1 in 4 or 5 times when I’ve done them in the past! So I’ll give them a rest for a little and re-visit those at a later date (when more leagues have kicked off and I’m a little more confident about the teams involved).

I think the best bet of the week was Rostov to score a goal at 5/6. Just looking at the recent stats for Anzhi it was obvious that Rostov could certainly score, and for a bet that could technically win after 30 seconds it represented great value. Every tipping page I looked at had Anzhi in an accumulator (at 2/5) or -1 handicap (at evens), mental. Most “tipsters” just look through the odds for that particular day, if they’re low, stick them in an accumulator, or if they’re too low they investigate handicaps. A lot of people lost money on that game, and I’m happy to say we were one of the lucky few to profit on it.

The worst bet is a tough one, there’s been a couple of bets I’ve not been happy about after the game (both Levadia bets!) but I think Helsinborg win that one, not because it was a bad bet, but because of my poor staking on it. I should have either advised the win, and left out the handicap, or gone purely for the handicap. Both meant we were relying on Helsinborg too much, and because of that we got punished. Once again, my apologies for that, lesson well and truly learnt.

Overall I’m relatively happy with the start we’ve made, and I believe that every bet teaches us something new. If a bet loses, maybe we under-estimated the team we were backing against, and maybe next time we could back them to do slightly better, and they’ll end up winning us money in the long-term. If a bet wins, that means our judgement was most likely good, and to look out for similar bets involving similar teams in the future.

This has been a bit longer than I’d anticipated it to be, if you’ve made it this far, good job and I hope it was useful!

 

Excellent reids, I'm joining in now and hoping to learn along the way as well. I would have started sooner but I forgot too many times in a row. Tomorrow is day one for me.

 

Great read reids! (hehe)

Some very good tips there, and I guess particularly good when you look at the ROI percentages. If we get as far as having quite a substantial bank, then the profits could be very nice indeed. And with your damage limitation advice of not betting more than 5% of the bank, then I guess it'll take an awful run of bets to empty the bank, even at this relatively early stage!

I look forward to continuing with this!

 

By the ROI, what are you actually talking about? Are you meaning the average return on bets? So for example, for a 10% ROI, if you bet £1 every day, though you'd win some days and lose some days, you'd average £1.10 per day? Or are you saying over a year, your gambling pot will grow by 10%?

 

It's just the total returns divided by the total staked.
Staking $1 a day at 10/1 and winning one and losing nine would give a ROI of 10%. Staking $1 a day at 1/10 and winning for 10 days would also give a ROI of 10%*

Only difference is the fluctuation in the short term.

* assuming my maths is right

P.S. thanks reids for the tips. I'm also joining in now. The udinese TSBH bets have been picked up by the bookies, I lumped on this morning at 19/20 and its now down to 4/7 best price.

 

One thing reids that I didn't agree with a few pages back is not to bet on your own team. For the majority this rings true but I think if you can take an objective view and remove the tinted glasses, you can be one step ahead due to your knowledge of the team and spot real value a little easier.

I had money on Birmingham and Bristol games but I'm avoiding Bournemouth for now as I know how volatile we can be in these situations.

Made a fair bit on one of Malky's seasons by taking the draw at HT and win at FT on a regular basis, for example.

I admire your ability to follow so many leagues though, thank you for sharing your knowledge.

 

If you do it sensibly then I agree with you, there was good reasoning behind the Bristol bet and I've got 150 on us to finish top 6 just because the bookies were pricing us as if the loanees weren't coming back. As you say, the knowledge on the team is useful but a lot of people just blindly back their own team week in week out, that's what I was meaning was bad!

 

So I shouldn't be placing £100 on a 3-3 draw then? fml.

 

Bony goal disallowed for offside. Clearly half a yard on.

Swansea looking very good, only fear is if they don't go in ahead then will Laudrup rest key players.

 

I think I've missed the boat on today's bets. I had a powercut today for 3 hours, then went to the gym and by the time I got back, I'd forgotten about it.

 

Swansea have 5 minutes to find the net, so that one isn't looking too healthy.

Di Natale put Udinese ahead in the 9th minute, and is 2 mins from HT. Need them to hold that and then win the second half to secure a profit for today.

Edit: Lazzari has scored for Udinese in the second half. Little over 5 minutes to hold out for a profitable day.

 

91p profit today having used a £1 freebet on the swansea game.

 

A certain Mr Vydra sealing a 4-0 win for Udinese.

 

Day 9:

Balance: 11.46

Not a bad day 8, Udinese came through in some style, gutted about Swansea, dodgy refereeing and linesmanship cost us that bet, but that’s part and parcel of betting!

French Div 1 Matches Montpellier v PSG
09-08-2013 19:30
Win-Draw-Win
PSG @ 5/6

Stake: 50p

PSG won the league in some style last season, finishing a huge 31 points ahead of Montpellier. Montpellier have lost arguably their best player over the summer (Younes Belhanda) and haven’t really splashed the cash finding a replacement (spent 1.5m over the summer). PSG on the other hand have an immense squad, with the recent 55m arrival, Cavani, sure to play here. Last season PSG won at home against Montpellier but drew 1-1 away (although Sakho did get sent off after 10 minutes played). This price is an absolute steal.

Austrian League Matches First Vienna FC 1894 v FC Liefering
09-08-2013 17:30
Handicap Betting
FC Liefering (-1.0) @ 7/5

Stake: 50p

FC Liefering are a newly promoted side, but it hasn’t shown by their recent results. They’ve played 4 games and won 4 games, scoring on average 4 goals per game, and conceding 1 goal per game. By contrast, Vienna haven’t won a game so far, and have lost 3 out of the 4 games played, conceding 3 goals per game on average, and scoring under a goal per game. These odds are certainly value.

 

Cheers reids!

Not think PSG are worth the handicap at 9/4?

 

Possibly worth the handicap, but not worth the risk imo, first league game of the season, didn't win by the greatest of margins against them last time, better safe than sorry, and 5/6 is hardly dire odds!

 

All the evidence points to Liefering getting stuffed!

 

Vienna 1-0 up.

 

3rd minute penalty. Not the greatest of starts! A goal before HT would give me some faith in this bet..

 

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Not a good start to today.