Betting strategies

If you have been keeping up with my blog, lately you have probably been reading a lot about “free bets.”  I put “free bets” in quotation marks because free bets are not really free - read more about this in my installment on What You Should Know About Free Bets.  There are a lot of strings attached to them, and quite often, you actually wind up losing money while you are trying to meet the criteria to claim them. 

If you have been looking for a way to conserve time and energy while you are wagering on british betting sites, you may have started looking into sports betting bots.  These are automated programs which provide you with alerts and/or place bets on your behalf on an ongoing basis.  Generally speaking, most sports betting bots are sold by experienced punters who have programmed them with their own betting systems.  But what if you want to create a bot which utilises your own betting strategies?  That is

In the world of sports betting, you will encounter several common attitudes towards betting systems:

• Who needs a system?  Go with your gut.
• You need a system, but if you want to prove you are a real expert, you need to create one yourself.
• Why reinvent the wheel?  You need a system, but you may as well just borrow one from someone else.

Do you have a system for betting on sports?  If the answer is “no,” please see the article, “Why Don’t You Have a Betting System?” to understand why you should consider having one.

While you will find numerous articles on coming up with techniques to determine whether a bet is worthwhile, you will not encounter as many articles that tackle the topic of money management.  Assuming you have discovered a bet is worth taking, how do you put a monetary value on it?  How do you decide how much to risk?

In Common Methods for Staking Bets, Part 1 and Common Methods for Staking Bets Part 2 of this series, I have discussed various common techniques for staking your bets which I feel that you should avoid. These include wagering everything in your account and progressive techniques such as Fibonacci and Martingale.

If you want to win at sports betting, you need to have a money management system. In this series I have been sharing common money management techniques used for setting bet sizes. In Common Methods for Staking Bets, Part 1, I focused on why you should not simply bet everything in your account—or more precisely, why you should not confuse your bankroll amount with your wager amount (if this sounds odd, read the article and you'll see what I am talking about).

If you are betting on sports, one thing you need is a money management system. There are numerous different systems out there you can use to stake your bets. I'd like to share some of the most common techniques with you now. Please note before reading ahead that most of these are actually pretty bad. The reason that I want to get into them is to save you the trouble and money and using them when you should avoid them.

Bet It All

In my previous article on this topic (Are You a System Hopper?

If you want to make consistent profits from sports betting season after season, you need to have a system.  A betting system is based on real-world patterns in performance.  It helps you to profit off of those patterns going forward, reducing your exposure to uncertainties.