Football betting strategy

What should I think of first when devising a football betting strategy?

Aside from good betting money management something that rates with equal importance is a good selection system.  To select football bets you need good football betting data, statistics, and access to free football bets to test your strategy.

Which football bets should I select for my football betting system?

Purist sports betting professionals would probably promote a strategy where you spot value in the bookmakers’ odds.  You place bets only where you feel the real probability of the event happening is more or less likely than that priced by the bookmakers.  This is how very talented betting professional consistently make money.  However, unless you are a wiz mathematician or a bookmaker yourself we would try to avoid some of the more complicated methods. 

Useful football betting resources

Some websites charge for football betting data, however these tend to come with excellent tools to help you with your football fixed odds betting.  An example of these value added services can be found at football betting data; an English Premier League football betting service.  Using the same data feeds that the bookmakers use this service offers exclusive statistics for Goals, Scorers, Corners and Bookings.  They also have a unique head to head betting system allowing you to match up any two teams in a selection of betting category, producing a good betting guide to every match.

A good free site for football betting statistics is football data.co.uk.  They employ a ratings system to forecast football match results based on one of three outcomes; win, lose or draw (other wise known as 1 x 2 betting).  Providing the data in a format that can be manipulated easily using Excel they take the time out of re-organising the data available from other football statistics sites.

Using a football rating system

A ratings system tries to forecast some aspect of a football game.  Such ratings systems can be used to predict the true probability of an event happening.  A good ratings system should, therefore, allow you an edge over the bookmakers.   More complicated betting strategy use ratings systems (see the Kelly Staking plan below).

One football rating system available is the goal superiority rating system.  Simply put, using goal difference as a means of measuring one team superiority over another it is possible to predict which team will win.

What are the best football betting markets?

The best markets are those where the odds compilers are more likely to make mistakes pricing up their bets. So that means steering clear of match results, because that's where the most money will be placed. Rest assured they will really have done their homework for these bets. Take a English Premiership game for example, which can have up to 30 markets. Including total goals, times of goals, corners, bookings, hat-tricksets, etc. Due to the competition to get your bets they will offer obsurdly large odds to get your business. Think Lampard to score and Rooney to get sent off. There is no chance to check their odds against the industry 'norm'.

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