5 Tips For Improving Your Football Betting Strategy
Content Editor at Free Super Tips, Alex was born in the shadow of Old Trafford and is an avid Man Utd fan. After graduating from university he combined his love of football, writing and betting to join FST and now closely follows goings-on in all of the top European leagues.
It’s always a good thing to try and improve your football betting strategy, whether you bet for fun or as a side income. You want to be making smart bets and giving yourself the best chance to make long term profit, that’s why the majority of us make bets right- to win.
Our football tipsters have shared their top 5 tips for improving your football betting strategy.
1. Track Your Bets
Make a simple spreadsheet or use good old fashioned pen and paper to record your bets. You can do this on a simple level of win/loss or you can go into much more detail noting leagues, markets, stakes and odds. You can then analyse where you’re making profit and where you’re losing money. This will also keep you disciplined because any bad bets or ones which aren’t fully researched will be recorded, you’ll quickly realise what a bad idea making these kind of bets are and cut them out.
2.Bankroll Management
Set yourself a betting bankroll if you’re serious about making profit from football betting (money which you will only use for gambling which you can afford to lose). You can then decide what staking plan you want to use. A good one to get started is flat staking, this means placing the same stake on every bet you make using a percentage of your bankroll. Start out flat staking 2-4% of your bankroll to see how you get on.
3. Understand Value
There seems to be a big misconception about what ‘value’ actually means. A lot of people seem to think anything short odds isn’t good value and anything at good odds is good value.
Let’s take a quick look – Value means betting on something that you think has a better chance of happening than the odds available at a bookmaker suggest.
Simple example – You think Manchester United win 50% of the time at home to Everton so they should be priced at 1/1. However bookmakers have them priced at 2/1 which means the bookmakers think they have a 33% of winning. Based on your research and opinion you think Manchester United are a value bet.
Making value bets will make you become a long term successful football bettor.
4. Get The Best Odds
Make sure you get the best odds for your bets, don’t stick to just one bookmaker. There are plenty of good bookmakers around, just take a look in our free bets section and you will see over ten. It’s important to get the best odds on your bets to maximise profit. If you’re not shopping around for the best odds then you’re missing out on easy profit.
Let’s say you’re backing singles only and you have 100 winners in a month. At even money you’d have £1,000 in returns but if you’d shopped around you could have backed them all at 11/10. It’s just 0.10 difference in decimal odds 2.00 to 2.10 but that would have given you an extra £10 profit on the month. Now let’s multiply that over the cause of a year and you’re looking at £120 profit missed.
It’s easy these days to keep your bankroll in an online wallet such as Skrill or PayPal and shop for the best odds so you can quickly and easily move money around different bookmakers to ensure you’re getting the best odds.
5. Review
We briefly mentioned this in point number one and it goes hand in hand with tracking. This is a pretty important one if you want to become a better and is something all of our inplay tipsters are monitored with here at FST.
Make sure you review your bets to see where you’re making your money so you can tweak and develop your strategy. You might find you’re making quite a bit of money on away teams in the Sky Bet Championship but losing a lot of money on the both teams to score market in the Premier League. You’d never know this if you didn’t track and review your bets. Looking at markets, leagues, odds ranges, time of day are all categories which can be tracked and reviewed. Just make sure you have a decent sample size of around 500 bets before making any decisions because variance will play a factor.
We hope this helps and can give you some insight in what you should be doing to develop and improve your football betting strategy in order to make long term profit.
