Start winning money from betting

As the world’s most popular sport, football has no shortage of self-proclaimed experts who are (perhaps overly) confident in backing the right teams on a weekly basis.

You know the type – the bloke in the pub who thinks he knows it all…but never wins a penny!

The majority of bettors will base their bets on their weekly consumption of football-related news and views across various media, of which there is a huge amount given the saturated coverage of the sport.

But the simple fact is this:

If the news is out there for everyone to see, you don’t have an edge.

Unless you hear the news before it breaks – or as it’s breaking – the markets will have already adapted.

The real advantage when it comes to football betting lies with those who take the time to learn to read between the lines and correctly interpret the finest of details.

In this guide, we’re going to reveal our expert football betting tips from every angle imaginable.

If we’ve not covered it here, it’s not worth knowing about!

In total, there are over 5,500 words of expert football betting tips in this post.

It is jam-packed with useful and actionable tips, but it may take multiple reads so that you can ensure all of the information has sunk in.

      

                        Season One

Market Breakdown

It seems logical to start with the very basics:
In this section, we’re going to be looking at the main football markets you can bet on.
We’re also going to consider the reasoning behind why you’d place a bet on any of the markets.

Match Result

Also known as win-draw-win, 1-x-2 and moneyline, the ‘match result’ market is fairly self-explanatory:
You have an option for each team to win the match within 90 minutes (plus stoppage time), and an option for the draw. Three options in total.
Win-draw-win is the most commonly bet on market in the whole of football. This is because picking the team that you think will win a game often requires less thought than some of the other markets.
People can often make a snap decision on who they would predict to be victorious in a match. These quick decisions commonly come down to personal biases and a team’s form over the last season, or last few matches.
Within this football betting guide, we’ll try to help you remove these biases from your thought process. This will help you make better picks on every market – particularly the 1-x-2.

Double Chance

With significantly lower odds than the market above, double chance allows you to cover two of the three outcomes in a football game.
This means you can back the home team or draw, away team or draw, or either team to win.
Whilst you will win on this market very often because the outcome likelihood is high, the odds are low and they often factor in quite a large bookmaker margin meaning you will actually be at a loss in the long-term.
You will have to find some extremely smart picks in order to be profitable in the double chance market.
We’re not saying avoid it, we’re just saying it’s hard to find real value. This is because the bookmaker overround is typically larger in this market.
This guide will aim to reinforce the idea of ‘finding value’ so that it becomes second nature to you when betting.
This is without doubt the most critical thing you need to consider when betting, but we’ll look at that in greater detail a little later.

Over/Under 2.5 Goals

In this market, you will be betting on whether a match will have over 2.5 goals (i.e. 3 or more to win your bet) or whether it will have under 2.5 goals (zero, one, or two goals would win your bet).
Depending on the teams in question, odds in the over 2.5 goals market – in league matches – will typically range from as low as 1.2 (1/5) up to a peak of around 2.5 (6/4).
You would find those extreme odds in matches featuring high-scoring teams like Barcelona or Real Madrid playing weak defences, or in the opposite scenario you could have two low-scoring, defensive teams playing one another.
On average, the odds in the over 2.5 goals market will be around 1.8 (4/5).
This market can be a little easier to find value in for those that have a good sense of how a match will be played out – even if you aren’t sure who will be victorious.
You will also find markets commonly offered pre-match for 0.5, 1.5, 3.5 and 4.5 goals – with the first and last markets in that list typically being the highest odds – but the 2.5 goal market is by far the most common to bet on.

Correct Score

The correct score market is one of the hardest to accurately predict.
This is highlighted by the SkyBet Super 6, whereby they award a £250,000 (or occasionally £500,000) prize to anyone that correctly guesses six correct scores out of six chosen matches each week.
There have only ever been a small number of winners.
The difficulty in predicting the outcome means that you’ll get high odds – but remember, this doesn’t necessarily mean high value.
Correct scores often have a very high bookmaker margin.
As previously mentioned, this makes it tough – but not impossible – to become profitable in the area long-term. There will also be huge variance due to the nature of betting at long odds.
Over 40% of games finish 1-1, 0-0, or with the home team winning 1-0 or 2-1.

Handicap Betting

Growing ever-more popular thanks to the Asian gambling market is handicap betting.
With a ‘handicap’, this type of bet aims to level the playing field between two teams – typically a strong team will have a -1.5 handicap against a weaker team, who will in turn have a +1.5 handicap if you wished to bet on them.
In simple terms, you’d need your team to win by two goals or more when betting with a -1.5 handicap.
If you chose to bet on the +1.5 handicap, you’d win your bet as long as your team won, drew, or lost by only one goal.
There are greater handicaps available too, but the above is the most common and the odds will typically hover around evens for both selections – depending on the two teams in question, obviously.

Half-Time/Full-Time

In the half-time/full-time market, you are betting for a team to be winning, drawing or losing at half-time, followed by them to be winning, drawing or losing at full-time.
This is not the same as winning, drawing or losing both halves.
For example:
If you bet on a team to win both halves and the result was 1-0 at half-time and 1-0 at full-time, that bet would lose.
If you had bet on that team to win half-time/full-time, the above result would be a winner.
Your best chance in this market is to go for the increased odds (compared to just a standard ‘match result – win’ bet) if you think a team has a good chance of starting strongly and seeing a result through.

Other Markets

There are hundreds of total markets in football betting, both pre-match and with additional in-play markets too.
Some of the most popular that we won’t be covering in more detail are the likes of First Goalscorer, First Team to Score and Scorecasts (first goalscorer odds multiplied by correct score odds).
It is quite common that the higher the odds are, the higher the bookmaker margin (and therefore the lower your ‘edge’) is.
The First Goalscorer market is known to have particularly poor odds outside of the favourite – and especially so on midfield and defensive players.
There will be markets out there that you can make profitable if you specialise in them.
If you follow the football bookie bashing tips listed throughout this entire guide and apply them correctly to markets that you master, is it possible to become a profitable punter.
Remember:
Just because it is possible, it does not mean it is probable.
Take your time, learn, improve, analyse, be sensible and be disciplined.

Accumulators

Accumulators are where you combine multiple selections from one or more markets (such as multiple teams in the ‘match result’ market) and the odds will be multiplied by each other and then your stake to create a potentially massive payout.
We aren’t going to cover accumulators – or accas – in any real detail here; unless you hit a fluke big win in a small sample size, they are unlikely to be profitable for you over any reasonable length of time unless you are exploiting acca insurance.

To be continued tomorrow