You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that doing your homework when betting on sports can lead to better decision making and improved profits.
For most bettors, scrolling through the Saturday afternoon schedule and picking out a few bankers can be relatively straight-forward, but that’s not going to put any serious cheddar on the table.
To improve your chances of generating consistent profits, you’ll need to vary your betting and take advantage of the masses of markets available at the top online bookmakers.
By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll know:
- How to create a betting strategy that works for you
- How to get the edge over a bookie
- The types of bets needed to make a big profit
- How to add consistency to your betting
Betting Strategy Tips You Need To Bear In Mind
If you want to make money through sports betting, then you need to be prepared to either commit a lot of time to it or take a higher-risk strategy that can pay off in higher rewards. The former is the better idea most of the time as research can help make informed bets. But this is still not a perfect, guaranteed strategy, so here’s a betting guide that can help you avoid some foolish mistakes.
There is no sound betting strategy for sports like football, horse racing, cricket, rugby or tennis. Even the best-researched, most reliable strategy will occasionally fail to come off much in the same way as there is no such thing as flawless horse racing tips. If there were a way to always win in betting, then bookmakers would go out of business; their money comes from people’s losses, after all. However many punters have found that strategies like up and down bets, four-fold bets, round robin bets, lay betting and Goliath bets have helped them pick up some impressive winnings.
It is not accurate to say you’ll never beat the bookies in the long run. With the correct strategies and the strength of nerve to put them into place, you can certainly come out ahead as long as you’re a realist and realise that there’s no completely risk-free sports bet.
Any successful bettor will tell you; always bet with won money. When you start funding your betting accounts from your household budget or your savings, it can quickly become a desperate strategy, and you can end up without a penny before long.
Bet online as a preference. There are far more options available on the internet for sports like football, horse racing and cricket, you can take more time crafting a bet, and it gives you more control over your chances of coming out with some money in hand.
How To Beat The Bookies: Football Predictions Can Make You Rich
The first tip for beating the bookies is a deceptively simple one: Know the sport you’re betting on. Well, of course, you should – isn’t that obvious? To have a chance of beating the bookies and making a profit long term, you need to know it. There’s nothing like doing your homework to help make informed bets to minimise risk.
If you’re a football fan, most of the country knows the sport at least a bit, which makes it harder to get one over on the bookies. However, if you’re a bit of a nerd about an esoteric league – say you happen to follow the Estonian MeistriLiga, for example – then there’s a good chance you know more than the people setting the odds.
Alternatively, if you’re a fan of a less well-followed sport such as volleyball, you don’t even necessarily need to get too obscure with your bets. You need to look out for the moments when the odds-setters have set too much store by a team’s high league position and made them odds-on favourites despite recent injury problems.
You’d be surprised how often decent odds come up in more obscure markets. Everyone knows, from one week to the next, who’ll be in the Manchester United squad and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The same is not true of Flora Tallinn of Estonia, for example.
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Accumulators: The Ideal Tricks To Beat The Bookies?
The use of accumulators is one way that bettors look to make big cash from a relatively small stake. If you have £5 to bet and want to make a big profit, you’ll need to predict a few outcomes correctly on the one bet. If used the right way, this can come off for you but bear a few things in mind first.
- Building a super-sized accumulator with twenty or thirty different teams on it may seem to be a recipe for big returns, but the truth is that even if those twenty teams are relatively sure things, one of them will more than likely lose or draw. Given that all it takes is for one result to go against you, it’s just not good value for making a profit long term.
- Don’t pad out accumulators with obvious odds-on bets. Even ten such bets in an accumulator may only result in odds of 3.50 (or 5/2). For any substantial winnings, you’d need a huge stake, and that is at the mercy of one player having the kind of nightmare that everyone has at least once in a career.
How To Consistently Win Football Bets: Go With Your Head, Not Your Heart
Having a lot of background knowledge of football and translating that into a winning strategy does not always go hand in hand. We all have our preferred teams and, when it comes to deciding who to back, it can be tempting to go all-in on the team we’ve been watching all season. However, successful bookmakers are counting on the many bettors who do just that every week.
- You may have been watching your team and have nothing but faith in that talented striker who puts away every chance he gets; you’re unlikely to have watched the opposition half as much, and football matches involve two teams, so avoid going with your heart too much here.
- With that said, if you watch your team often and have a player who always seems to be in amongst the action, you could always back them to score at any time in the game. Even the most reliable strikers are often available at odds of around 2.30-2.50, and it’s much more likely that your player will score (and your team lose) against the league leaders than it is that your team will win.
How To Beat The Bookies More Often: Shop Around
The process of setting up an account with an online bookie can be tiresome, and you probably don’t want to do it any more often than you have to. That’s what passes for brand loyalty in the betting world – just not wanting to open another account.
You certainly should open more than one account, though, because the soundest betting strategy is to take every advantage the betting world will offer you. They aren’t going to offer you many, so you need to grab bonus bets & offers where possible. More accounts opened means:
- More free bets & startup bonuses. Most bookies will match your first deposit, or your first bet, with a free bonus that can be up to three times your initial deposit. If you read through the terms and conditions, you might see that you can’t withdraw the money. Instead, you need to use it to bet, but it can make you plenty of money if you make good use of your free bets. Free bets are the easiest way to make a standard bet something incredible.
- More free bets & special offers. Bookmakers are not going to offer free money, but if you haven’t bet recently, or have signed up and not bet at all for a while, you will sometimes get a special offer that can be used to beat bookies. Some will give longer odds on a favourite for a limited time; others may offer your money back on an accumulator that is let down by one part, and so on. The more accounts you have, the more offers you’ll get. Just be sure to read the terms and conditions of your free bets. Free bets usually have restriction overtime limits and qualifying odds, so make sure you understand the small print.
- More choice in odds. One sure way to beat bookies is to take the longest odds you can get. No one bookmaker is any more generous on odds than any other, but it’s rare to see every bookmaker have the same prices for a specific outcome. Check them all before betting, and always go with the longest odds.
How To Beat The Bookies More Often Than Not
If you want to know how always to win football bets, then the unfortunate news is that there is no way of getting it 100% right as there is no such thing as a completely risk-free wager. Before a match kicks off, we can feel sure that one team will win, and in those cases, their odds will be short – and even then, shocks happen from time to time, so be sure to check out the live betting options. If you want to find a betting strategy that will serve you well, don’t look for perfection. Look for ways to exploit the bookies’ generosity on things like football derbies, gaps in their knowledge or other quirks.
- Odds on an outcome will narrow the more money a bookie receives on it. So if a bookie is British-based, it’s likely they’ll have longer odds on a football team that’s playing against England at a World Cup. Given England’s tendency to underperform, it may be worth backing a decent mid-level team against them at a tournament.
- If betting on the outsider in a match, place a small bet which will nonetheless have big returns if it comes off. £5 on a 10/1 outsider is still a £50 win if the outsider upsets the odds.
It may be true that you never see a poor bookmaker, but equally, there is no such thing as a bookmaker who knows everything and can see the future. By using our heads, we can pick up some decent winnings.
There will be times they don’t see something coming – remember Leicester City and their 5,000/1 Premier League win – and if you’re a smart bettor, you can be the one who takes advantage, and get one over on the bookies.
