I’ve been betting for many years and have probably done just about everything wrong that can be done wrong. So I’ve won a few super super accumulator bets with odds beyond 15 or 20, but I’ve also lost a lot more. I also had a few nice winning streaks, which I then destroyed out of hubris. The fact that I was pretty much level for a couple of years was probably more luck than sense. But with wettstrategie.at I will now also change my way of betting and gradually discipline it.
In my first post, I want to cover the very first basics that aim to describe how to bet long-term.
SELECTION OF SPORTS AND GAMES
In all life situations, it’s safer to focus on the things you’re good at. The great Ernst Happel once said: “In life you always have to do what you can do. Because that’s the simplest thing. If you can’t do it, it gets complicated.” And so it is with sports betting. Be honest with yourself and admit what sport you really don’t know at all. If your heart is only in football, you won’t make a profit in basketball in the long run. And vice versa. So limit yourself to the sports that you think you know something about and that you can observe and analyze for yourself.
And within those sports, it’s wise to narrow down where your know-how-technical strengths and weaknesses lie. If you follow every game in the German Bundesliga, know the players, understand the tactics of the teams and maybe know who is suspended or injured a week before the next game, it is more advisable to bet on games in this league than on games from leagues you don’t follow.
ANALYZE GAME, UNDERSTAND ODDS
If you decide to bet on a particular soccer match, you should analyze it first before making a hasty bet that will annoy you later. Consult the official club websites of the two opponents, check the sports websites for cancellations or special circumstances. And then you make your decision. Try to analyze the upcoming clash, not the general stats of the two clubs. Of course, a club’s latest results, the last direct duels or the table standings are not negligible factors – but they should not be the only reason to place a bet.
Whenever you place a bet, you should always check the odds carefully. If you think a bookmaker has overstated the odds, you should risk a bet. Always remember that you are betting against a bookmaker. Analyze the game and mentally play bookmakers yourself. What odds would you give a particular bet? If you give odds of 1.7 on team XY’s home win and the bookmaker offers 2.1, you should risk a tip.
From experience I also advise you to stay away from mini-odds like 1.05, 1.10 or 1.20. With such supposedly safe bets, you will do more harm than good in the long run. A little milkmaid math: at odds of 1.15 for Barcelona to win Almería at home, you would need to bet around €870 to make a net profit of €100. That may often go well, but at some point it doesn’t go well anymore and then a high stake is gone. In my opinion, the relationship between risk and meaning is simply not given here. Even Barcelona don’t win every home game for which bookmakers give such thin odds – the Guardiola team’s 2-0 defeat against Hercules Alicante in autumn 2010 is a good example of this. And that happens to EVERY big club from time to time. sure.
SINGLE BETS GOOD, ACCUM BETS NOT SO GOOD
If you want to make consistent profits, you should primarily play single bets. I know it’s tempting at odds of 1.85, which you’re pretty sure about, to place a “safe” bet to turn the @1.85 into @2.20, for example. Suppress that. Take the @1.85 and be happy when you win it instead of getting angry that it wasn’t a @2.20. I often made this mistake and later regretted it bitterly.
An example of how pretty much everything I’ve described so far can go wrong was a bet I made in late summer 2010. I had worked out a bet very precisely and predicted a home win for the Italian second division club Grosseto. The odds for this were 2.0, but I wanted to increase that odds and added the Brøndby Copenhagen women’s team. For the home win of the highly favored Danes, I received a rate of 1.2, which resulted in an overall rate of 2.4. Logical what happened: I got greedy, the @2.0 got too low for me, so I grabbed the first game I found, even though I didn’t know the teams, didn’t check the game for a second and trusted that the Brøndby women are a bit Barcelona in their league. Grosseto won comfortably and the Brøndby ladies lost – stakes gone….
Of course, this is not to say that combining bets is completely wrong. You can also achieve respectable profits with measure and aim with combination bets. But what I described before applies: You should always think carefully about which games you want to bet on and whether the odds actually have a certain value. Steer clear of accumulator bets consisting of four, five, six or even more games. To make a Bundesliga conference more exciting and entertaining, you can have fun – but you won’t win anything with such monster constructs in the long run.
Live betting has become increasingly popular in recent years. This presents exciting opportunities for bettors as bookmakers cannot always react correctly to gameplay within a split second and spot trends too late. With innovative tools like Overlyzer I keep an eye on the live trends from more than 800 leagues and competitions and thanks to the extensive filter functions I have a decisive advantage when placing my bet. Live betting combined with Overlyzer should be in every bettor’s arsenal as there is no better betting strategy on the market right now.
NEVER BET IMPULSIVELY
You will win many bets over the course of your betting life, but you will certainly lose some as well. If you win a bet, rejoice – if you lose a bet, don’t fret. Trouble in betting breeds trouble. One of the biggest problems of all gamblers is impulsiveness after losing bets. If the bet is lost, it is lost. Never compulsively try to get the lost money back with a new bet right away. In most cases this goes wrong. Consider each bet you play independently of the next. You don’t win a bet to play another and you don’t play a bet because you lost one before.
NEVER BET MORE THAN YOU HAVE
Most important of all, never bet more than you have. I think this sentence should be enough, everyone will understand it. A more detailed analysis on bankroll management, bet sizes, etc. will follow soon!
