Hi!
I’m a young man who has a strong passion for sport. This passion for sport has been with me from a very young age however, in the last few years I have translated this knowledge to sports betting and trading. If I was forced to pick my top five sports, in no particular order, it would have to be football, darts, snooker, tennis and cricket.
As we all know, lockdown in 2020 was extremely tough – if only you had a £1 for every time someone said this!
The sports betting industry dried up dramatically, as the top flight leagues dropped off one by one. Some of us found ourselves on a dodgy Facebook stream watching the Belarusian top flight! I managed to take it to the next step by scouring the markets in these games, from anytime goalscorer to in-play corners.
How muggy of me, you may be thinking! However, you will learn that my selections will all be value based and data driven bets and, if you have the data, these can be found in any league.
On the odd occasion there was some good value in the anytime goalscorer market and one in particular was Yakhshiboev for Energetik-BGU, who stood out to me in March 2020. Since this stint in the Belarusian League he has gone on to grab himself a goal in the Champions League for Moldovan side Sheriff.
My betting background
I first got involved with betting when I was around 9 or 10 years old, snooping over my father’s shoulder checking his punts before the Premier League kicked off at 12:30.
I had the odd bet with him, the classic 10-fold acca with 1×2 and over/under goals markets. Then, 45 minutes later I’d be kicking myself when the first leg is already in pieces – never back the early kick off!
A few years later, when I was around 14-15 years old and I continued to learn about different sports, I wondered if this knowledge could relate to the betting markets – maybe it could make me some money!?
I signed up with accounts to some free stat sites to fine tune my selections. With hundreds of fixtures ahead of a weekend schedule in various sports, it can be difficult to reduce the volume of potential bets. However, always ensuring that you have solid reasoning, stats and predictions behind any bets will be a good start to giving yourself a chance of making regular profits.
Fast forward again to the summer of 2019 and with not a spare penny to my name I managed to sign up to a few survey sites that would pay for completed surveys. 10p… 15p… I thought I hit the jackpot when they were paying 70p for a 10 minute long survey!
Eventually my balance got to double figures and then later still £40 before the tedious work got the better of me. Four months’ worth of surveys for £40!
A few months later, lockdown hit, and I was looking for somewhere to increase my bankroll, with any luck, a bit quicker than the surveys did!
A fantasy football trading site called Footstock, which a few of you may remember, sprung up and I invested £40 into the market and ‘bought’ a few players…
Suddenly, hundreds and thousands of gamblers joined the site and invested. Prices were rocketing up and my £40 was gradually building up. Before long that £40 had over ten folded in the space of three week – the user base had also ten folded in this space of time.
I could not believe what I was seeing, albeit this was lucky timing (later, Footstock went the same way as Football Index).
Eventually, after six months on the site my final total was just over £4000, it peaked at around £5500.
My betting style
Fortune aside, one thing this story did do was back up my belief that big edges can be found when the markets first open. After all, getting ahead of thousands of other punters is vital.
For example, the Saturday 12:30 kick off markets will go live with the bookies perhaps a week before. The ‘prop’ bets (tackles, passes etc) will be around Thursday morning, and this is when the bookies will have taken low volumes on the bets.
Value can be found most easily early on – the prices will eventually correct themselves closer to kick off as thousands of the shrewd bettors will expose mistakea made by the bookie.
It is important to note however that I don’t think you can ONLY find value over 48 hours before kick-off. Some exceptional value can also be found later on and also in the in-play markets.
I have found that most of my profit has come in the football props, and this has been my main focus for the last couple of months. Bookies are starting to increase their availability of these markets which is good to see.
Other sports such as tennis and darts have less data available for punters to use but I see this as a good factor, as the less data that is put in front of the majority, the better chance you have of finding the value ahead of them. Very few people will trawl through numbers thoroughly before having a bet and this is sadly why only 2-3% of UK gamblers are profitable.
For these reasons, I am determined to find an edge in these sports that will prove consistent over a long period of time. Personally, I am all about the longevity of successful bets over one off big wins.
A bad weekend of bets will not concern me as I will believe that in the future the strategy will be profitable. This also works vice versa: a good weekend of bets can easily be balanced out by a horror run midweek… Riding the variance, I call it.
Bets incoming soon!
I am excited to be writing for Bet Chat and my aim is to provide some quality free previews with a few tips included, plus information that you can use to find your own bets.
My process and reasoning for all the bets I send out will be clearly stated and I look forward to engaging with the Bet Chat community. Happy punting!
