Since starting this service a year ago I have been fortunate to talk to a lot of our members about their journey in betting and I believe 90% have taken the same path. It paints an interesting picture of why people get in to betting, what they believe are the best methods of profiting and the mistakes that are made along the way.

The Casual Bet

Your foray in to betting may start with a punt on a horse you fancy in the Grand National, or a team you fancy to win the World Cup. You have no real understanding of the odds but you think Tiger Roll is going to win the Grand National so you stick £10 on with your local bookmaker. You don’t really care about the odds you just want the interest of a cash prize if you’ve picked the right winner.

The flaws at this stage of your journey are the lack of understanding in the relationship between odds and the chance of the outcome happening. You’ve backed the favourite in the Grand National at 4/1 but how often does the favourite win given the nature of the race? Maybe you’ve backed Brazil to win the World Cup at Evens (2.00), but at this price they have to win 50% of the time to break even – is this a fair assessment of their chance of winning the tournament?

The Saturday Accumulator

You then decide to move on from a couple of bets a year and download an app on your phone. You soon realise that you can combine multiple selections together to form an accumulator and some bookies will let you pick 12 teams to win and your eyes start popping out at the odds on offer. You’ve picked 12 teams that you believe are bankers and you’re being offered 100/1. You stick £5 on it with the lure of £500 profit on Saturday evening. Most of your selections win and you end up with 9 of your teams winning and 3 losing – you lose your £5. However you are buoyed by this – after all you picked 9 teams that won their match and if only those other 3 teams hadn’t thrown away their lead the £500 would have been yours. The following Saturday you pick another 12 teams but a couple let you down again. This happens every weekend of the year and you’ve lost £260 (£5 x 52 weekends). You decide that maybe accumulators aren’t the way forward because it only takes one team to let you down. Surely there must be another way of betting and to make money....

The £5-£250 Challenge

You create a Twitter account and see a whole host of accounts that are trying to lure you in with challenges. Start with £5 and with carefully selected bets you get to £250. This is in reality just a glorified accumulator – you still need your 10 or 12 bets to win in order to get to your end prize. You may turn your £5 in to £100 and on the next bet in the challenge you lose – the tipster will then console you by telling you that “you’ve only lost your £5 starting stake” or “it’s only a bit of fun and to only bet what you can afford to lose”.

You decide that you’ve had enough of accumulators and challenges and want to start recouping some of the losses you’ve made with your betting so far. You wonder if singles are the way to go.

The Watch Lists

After deciding that you only want to play single bets you stumble across people offering lists of matches that they believe will have a first half goal in them. They come with a list of 20 matches per day and you are told to bet on a first half goal to be scored when the odds reach evens. That evening the tipster sends out a screenshot of the matches that had a first half goal in them and they are all marked as winners. However, what will not be clear is in how many of the games the odds were even available for a first half goal at evens. These matches are invariably just games with a high expected goal count. The odds therefore reflect it and the starting line for first half goals may be over 2.5 so it hasn’t taken the tipster much effort or ability to identify. These tipsters are continually called out for this on Twitter but there is another aspect that is not mentioned, and that is the methodology of ‘wait for odds to reach 2.00). If you are betting pre-match on a first half goal you know that you have 45 minutes for that to happen, and you know the odds on offer. You can then make an assessment of the odds versus the % chance. However, in this example of Watch Lists you are being told to wait until the odds hit without knowing how many minutes this will take. Let’s pretend that evens are offered after 32 minutes – that means you have 13 minutes left to find the first half goal for your bet. What are the chances of that happening? What if the odds don’t achieve 2.00 until the 40th minute? Are you still going to bet on this? The methodology is intrinsically flawed but you are lured in by the green ticks on matches despite the odds not being available. You then decide that Watch Lists / First Half Goal Lists aren’t for you but you are satisfied that singles are the way forward.

A Professional Service

You are still sure that there is a way to profit from betting and you are satisfied that singles will generate you long term profit. You then find a service such as Sports Betting Portfolio (or others – there are other good and responsible services) who have tipsters that understand the intimate relationship between odds and % chance of an event happening. You are advised about bankroll management and the importance of tracking your bets. You stay disciplined all month, you don’t fritter away money on silly accas and at the end of the month you are able to withdraw profits from your accounts.

The important thing here is that your time prior to joining a service such as ours is not wasted as long as you learn from it. Acknowledge that accas and challenges are not profitable in the long term. You lost money doing them but you have learnt from it and you’re changing your betting behaviour for the better. It is human instinct to want the maximum reward for the minimum outlay and effort – an acca appears to give you this opportunity but it doesn’t work. As long as you stay disciplined and understand what you are trying to achieve then betting with us will be profitable and enjoyable. If you are somewhere along the journey above then please recognise the pitfalls of each of the stages. You can profit from betting and we will give you all the help you need to do that.