What is the Fibonacci System for Sports Bettors?

Are you looking for a betting system you can use for setting your bet sizes over the course of a season? Whether you are betting on football, horse racing, tennis, cricket, rugby, or any other sport, one method you will encounter time and again is the Fibonacci system.

What is the Fibonacci system? Think back for a moment to your high school mathematics classes (or earlier). At some point in your education, you probably learned about the Fibonacci sequence of numbers.  This is a sequence where each new number is the sum of the previous two.

So the Fibonacci numbers go like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …

You can see how these numbers were generated:

1+1 = 2

1+2 = 3

2+ 3 = 5

3+5 = 8

And so on.

How does this apply to sports betting?  There are punters who use the Fibonacci numbers to manage the sizes of their bets.

So let’s say for example that you are wagering on football.  A Fibonacci betting system was developed and published for football in 2007. The idea is to continually bet on draws, because they are hard to predict. Each time you lose your bet, you bet on another draw. You do this only when the profitability exceeds 2.618.  Each time, you increase the stake of your bet in such a way that you are following the Fibonacci sequence.  So your initial take might be £1, and your next take £1, and then your next stake £2, then £3 and so forth. 

Draws do happen pretty commonly in football, despite being hard to predict, and because they are hard to predict, they tend to result in high payouts. If you look for example at the data for the 2011/12 Premier League, and you assume the betting sizes above, you do get a profitable result for this season adding up to more than £1,700. That is pretty good, and may say something for this method in this particular situation. Because the draws are common, and you are continuously increasing your bet sizes, you can expect that eventually your wins will more than make up for your losses—particularly since draws tend to pay out well.

All of that said, there certainly are still plenty of drawbacks to the Fibonacci system, and it does not always apply so well as a strategy. In fact, trying to apply the strategy during the 2011/12 Premier League season would not necessarily have worked out in the first place. This example considered the data from all of the games during the season. Wagering on all of those games simply would not have been practical. Not only that, but many of them were played at the same time, which would have made it impossible to implement the Fibonacci sequence.

So you may be wondering why you simply could not wager on a particular team. But remember, this would also change the situation, because you might go a long time without a draw. While this could theoretically result in great returns, you would have to bet an exorbitant amount of money before you could cash out. Chances are good that you would blow your bankroll long before you got there.

In other words, a common fallacy of thinking with bettors who rely on the Fibonacci sequence is in thinking that just because the sequence itself goes on forever, that means that they too can go on forever. If you could hang around that long, yes, in theory you could win big. But again, in practical terms that is simply, to put it kindly, unlikely.

So should you use the Fibonacci sequence while you are betting or not? It is something you can try if you are curious, then I recommend that you do it on paper instead of with real money. It is certainly an interesting exercise in mathematics, but you will probably reach the same conclusion, which is that it is simply impractical as a money management technique for real-life betting.