10 Ways to Bet Smart
It’s incredibly difficult to turn a profit betting on sport, but here are 10 steps that will seriously improve your chances.
1. Value
Value is the key to gambling for profit rather than for entertainment. Though making a profit is always more entertaining.
It’s quite common, after a favourite wins, for someone to say that so-and-so was quite clearly the best, and you should have backed them because it was obvious they were going to win.
This is a fundamental mistake of confusing who has the best chance of winning and where your money should go.
Imagine Man City are playing Sheffield Utd at the Etihad (at the time of writing, 1st and 20th in the Premier League). A bookmaker might price this game:
Man City 1/6 (decimal odds 1.17; US odds -600) 85.7% probability
Draw 6/1 (7.0; 600) 14.3%
Sheff Utd 20/1 (21.0; 2000) 4.8%
Clearly, Man City are the most likely winners and should win this game more than six times out of seven (85.7%). Sheff Utd would be expected to win the game less than once in every 20 attempts (4.8%).
Crucially, if this game was theoretically played a hundred times, Man City would be very unlikely to win all one hundred. This is obvious but something people tend to forget when assessing the chances of something happening: extremely likely does not mean certain.
So if a brave bookmaker were to offer you 100/1 (or indeed anything above 20/1) on Sheff Utd, then they become value, and that is where your money should go, regardless of who you think is most likely to win, because mathematically you would only need them to win once in every hundred theoretical games to be level and twice in every hundred to turn a healthy profit, which surely even the Blades could muster.
This doesn’t mean of course that you should automatically dismiss the favourite as a betting option. It may be that, according to your judgement, they are still a value bet.
You need to be able to judge whether the price of each individual participant or team is or isn’t greater than in your opinion it should be.
That, in short, is what people mean when they talk about “value”. Of course, having the judgement to know when something is or isn’t value is the tricky bit.
2. Shop Around
To maximise value you need to shop around for the best prices. Use an odds comparison site such as oddschecker to make sure you always take the biggest price available. This will involve opening accounts with multiple bookmakers – there’s no way around it unfortunately.
The benefits of always taking the best price may seem minor but over time they add up and are often the difference between profit and loss.
It’s also worth checking which bookmakers offer extra place terms – the number of places an each way bet will be paid out on. Boylesports for example often pay out on fourth or even fifth place on a bike race – though the prices may be slightly shorter to reflect this.
Obviously, prices change due to weight of money or new information. The prices I advertise on my selections are available at the time of publication, but may change afterwards. There’s nothing more annoying than a price being advertised that has long since disappeared, but I’ll do my best to be as transparent and honest as possible if this is likely.
3. Document
Be honest with yourself – document all of your bets, your profits and your losses, as a reality check on how you are doing. And if it isn’t going very well, assess why and change strategy, or stop. It’s also a great excuse for some spreadsheet therapy.
Also, try writing a brief preview of the event just for yourself. It doesn’t have to be long and it makes you check some facts, sharpen up your arguments and justify your decisions.
4. Discipline
Don’t bet impulsively or lazily. Make sure that you can justify each bet with logical reasoning. Though some people can make it pay, I’m not a huge fan of betting in running (placing bets after an event has started) as it encourages impulsivity.
Don’t bet the hunch! Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing when to bet.
5. Specialize
Very few people have an in-depth knowledge of multiple sports. For betting purposes, stick to one, or even better, one area within that sport. This gives you a manageable amount of information to keep on top of. Obviously, it helps if you have a serious interest or passion in this area.
By specialising in a niche sport you are giving yourself a greater chance of knowing as much or more than the trader pricing the event up. This is particularly true in non-sports events such as politics or TV events where a trader’s knowledge of say, the Eurovision Song Contest, might be limited.
6. Research
Leading on from point 5, you can’t expect to make a profit if you don’t put the hours in researching your subject. Keep as up to date as possible with news, quotes, articles, betting markets, Twitter feeds etc. to ensure you’re armed with as much good information as possible when analysing an event.
7. Alcohol
Doesn’t mix well with betting. It can lead to a lack of judgement, chasing your losses off a cliff, and in some cases punter rage. Watch the game in the pub, but keep your smartphone in your pocket.
8. Form
What is it to be in “good form”? It’s something that’s so cemented in our sporting lexicon that we don’t always assess what it is we mean.
Many astute bettors and statisticians would agree that “form” can be a mirage; some may even argue it doesn’t exist. This can sometimes drift nearer to philosophy and psychology than sport or betting.
If you’re in “good form” it suggests that you are consistently performing above your level of ability which should have an impact on future success. And the opposite is true, a team on a run of losses is automatically said to be in “bad form”.
In betting terms, there is data to suggest that bookmakers are influenced by form, overpricing underperforming sides and underpricing those in “good form”, succumbing to what is known as “recency bias”, ie being overly influenced by recent events.
Rather than “form”, something else might be at play. It’s possible that it’s a statistical anomaly which in time will be righted, known as “regression to the mean” in betting statistics lingo.
Soccer is a good example of how to demonstrate this. Due to the low number of goals (around 2.5 on average per game), the result – win, lose, or draw – can be determined by very small margins.
Imagine two teams of equal ability repeatedly playing each other on a neutral ground. You would expect an equal number of wins for Team A as for Team B. Certain results may be decided on a shot hitting the wrong side of the post, an injury, a dodgy penalty or any one of hundreds of small moments, turning a win into a draw, a draw into a loss, and so on.
It would be unusual if the sequence of results was something like WLD WLD WLD etc. just as it would be if coin tosses went heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails. A long sequence of wins or losses may look like good and bad form when in fact they are expected variations that are likely to even out over time.
So, try not to be overly influenced by recent events – they give you a very accurate guide to what just happened, but not necessarily what is going to happen, which is what we’re interested in.
Try to look at the bigger picture – are they actually better than you thought? or are they likely to return to performing at their previous level?
9. Football/Soccer
Due to its popularity, everyone thinks they’re an expert but few are, especially when it comes to making money out of it. Many get a huge amount of pleasure from betting on football for entertainment, which is fine, but don’t expect to be up long term. Margins are tight and results can be very unpredictable.
10. Video Slots
The British public spent £2.2bn on online slot games in 2019. They are ridiculously profitable for bookmakers and a potentially addictive form of gambling that is likely to be more heavily regulated in the next UK Gambling Act. Avoid.
And finally, an extra very important point
11. Addiction
If you’re worried about your gambling habits and need to talk to someone, there are several charities and institutions in the UK that offer free, confidential services including GambleAware, GamCare, and YGAM.
