Significant Events

A poster on the Betfair forum writing about the challenge of making money from football betting, wrote this great line:

I read posts on here from smartarses who bang on about ‘needing an edge’ to make it on Betfair, as if this mystical, intangible ‘edge’ empowers them as some kind of superior being. Bulls***.

Long may such people continue to play on the exchanges. No edge - no long-term profit. It's as simple as that. A neat reply summed it up:

You don't need an edge on here, any more than a shopkeeper needs to sell things for more than he paid for them.

Quite.

Given that the poster does 8-fold accas and then bemoans his luck when one result doesn't come in, he clearly doesn't have a clue about value.

As well as increasing the over-round against the punter, accas have another hugely undesirable effect which is that they remove control over staking. If your starting bank is £10, would you really want to win the first 7 bets and have perhaps £1,000 riding on Chelsea to beat Fulham? Profitable punting is as much about bank management as it is about selections and prices.

Football is prone to unpredictable results because a feature of the game is that it has a "low incidence of highly significant events". A single event can have a huge affect on the outcome of the game, and such events are normally highly unpredictable. Penalty decisions, missed chances, goals, sending-offs etc. Rather than whining about this, the poster would be better served by using this knowledge to his advantage.

If you see that the Big Four at home when priced at 1.25 are only winning 70% of the time, don't complain about it - make money!

Football Elite have been on the wrong side of some "highly significant events" recently over the holidays, with their 7 recommended bets yielding 3 winners, 3 draws and one match postponed - a small profit of 1.73 to a 10 point stake.

Their short-list selections were less successful with 11 selections yielding just 2 winners, along with 6 draws, 2 losses and one postponement. A loss of 50.74 to a 10 point stake. My month long free trial is over, but I am happy to pay for the next six months, confident that value is being found, even if an abundance of draws is currently handicapping their profits.