I have been betting for many years and have probably done pretty much everything wrong that you can do wrong. I have won a few super-super combination bets with odds of more than 15 or 20, but I have also lost a lot more. I have also had a few nice winning streaks that I then ruined again due to overestimating myself. The fact that I was pretty much on a par for a few years was probably more luck than sense. But with wettstrategie.at I will now change the way I bet and gradually discipline it.
In my first post I would like to go into the very first basics that describe how to bet long-term.
SELECTION OF SPORTS AND GAMES
In all situations in life, it is safer to concentrate on the things you are good at. The great Ernst Happel once said: “In life, you always have to do what you are good at. Because that is the easiest thing. If you don’t master it, things get complicated.” And that is also the case with sports betting. Be honest with yourself and admit which sport you really don’t master at all. If your heart only belongs to football, you will not make a profit in the long run with basketball. And vice versa. So limit yourself to the sports that you think you know something about and that you can observe and analyze yourself.
And within these sports, it is advisable to narrow down in which areas your technical strengths and weaknesses lie. If you follow every game in the German Bundesliga, know the players, understand the teams’ tactical approach and perhaps know a week before the next game who is suspended or injured, it is more advisable to bet on games in this league than on games in leagues that you do not follow.
ANALYZE THE GAME, UNDERSTAND THE ODDS
If you decide to bet on a specific football match, you should first analyze it before hastily placing a bet that you will later regret. Consult the official club pages of the two opponents, check the sports websites for cancellations or special circumstances. And then make your decision. Try to analyze the upcoming duel, not the general statistics of the two clubs. Of course, the last results of a club, the last direct duels or the league table are not negligible factors – but they should not be the only reason to place a bet.
When placing a bet, you should always check the odds carefully. If you think a bookmaker has set the odds too high, you should risk a bet. Always remember that you are betting against a bookmaker. Analyse the game and mentally play bookmaker yourself. What odds would you give to a particular bet? If you give odds of 1.7 on team XY to win at home and the bookmaker offers 2.1, you should risk a bet.
From experience, I would also advise you to stay away from mini odds like 1.05, 1.10 or 1.20. With such supposedly safe bets, you will do yourself more harm than good in the long run. A little naive calculation: With odds of 1.15 for a home win for Barcelona against Almería, you would have to bet around €870 to make a net profit of €100. That may work out relatively often, but at some point it won’t work out and then a large stake will be lost. In my opinion, the balance between risk and sense of purpose is simply not there. Even Barcelona doesn’t win every home game for which bookmakers quote such thin odds – the 0:2 defeat of Guardiola’s eleven in autumn 2010 against Hercules Alicante is a good example of this. And that happens to EVERY big club from time to time. One thing is certain.
SINGLE BETS GOOD, COMBINATION BETS NOT SO GOOD
If you want to make consistent profits, you should primarily play single bets. I know it’s tempting to place a “safe” bet at odds of 1.85, which you’re pretty sure of, to turn the @1.85 into a @2.20, for example. Suppress that. Take the @1.85 and be happy when you win it, rather than being upset that it wasn’t a @2.20. I’ve made this mistake more than once and bitterly regretted it afterwards.
An example of how you can do pretty much everything I’ve described so far wrong was a bet I made in late summer 2010. I had worked out a bet very carefully and tipped for a home win for the Italian second division team Grosseto. The odds for this were 2.0, but I wanted to increase these odds and added the Brøndby Copenhagen women’s team. I got odds of 1.2 for the home win for the highly favored Danish team, which gave a total odds of 2.4. Logically, what happened: I got greedy, the @2.0 became too low for me, so I grabbed the first game I found, even though I didn’t know the teams, didn’t look at the game for a second and trusted that the Brøndby women were a bit like Barcelona in their league. Grosseto won comfortably and the Brøndby women lost – stake gone….
Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely wrong to combine bets. You can also make respectable profits with combination bets if you do it in moderation. But what I described earlier still applies: you should always think carefully about which games you want to bet on and whether the odds actually have a certain value. But stay away from combination bets that consist of four, five, six or more games. You can allow yourself the fun to make a Bundesliga conference more exciting and entertaining – but you won’t win anything in the long run with such monster constructs.
Live betting has become increasingly popular in recent years. This offers very interesting opportunities for bettors, as bookmakers cannot always react correctly to the course of the game within a split second and can recognize trends too late. With innovative tools such as Overlyzer, I keep an eye on the live trends from more than 800 leagues and competitions and have a decisive advantage when placing my bet thanks to the extensive filter functions. Every bettor should have live betting in combination with Overlyzer in their arsenal, because there is currently no better betting strategy on the market.
NEVER BET IMPULSIVELY
You will win many bets over the course of your betting life, but you will certainly lose some too. When you win a bet, be happy about it – when you lose a bet, don’t be upset. Anger in betting brings anger. One of the biggest problems of all gamblers is impulsiveness after losing bets. When the bet is lost, it’s lost. Never compulsively try to immediately make back the money you lost with a new bet. This goes wrong in most cases. Consider each bet you play independently of the next one. You don’t win a bet to play another one, and you don’t play a bet because you lost one before.
NEVER BET MORE THAN YOU HAVE
The most important thing of all: never bet more than you have. I think this sentence should be enough, everyone will understand it. A more detailed analysis about bankroll management, bet size, etc. will follow soon!