1. Assume every bet to be a losing bet.
Someone once wrote “don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose”, the worst piece of advice I have ever heard. What does it mean? Who can afford to lose money? If your one betting strategy is to bet what you can afford to lose, you have opened up the one thing, your emotions, that are guaranteed to leave you profitless.
Making a bet personal allows a huge variety of complications to enter the equation. However, if you expected every bet to lose you make yourself detached from the money and you can concentrate on the bet in hand.
How often have you heard of the doctor who smokes or drinks too much and can’t look after his health, the accountant who can’t control his own finances, because they don’t treat themselves like their clients or patients. The same is true of betting one must treat it as a business rather than a frivolous past time, if you wish to succeed. When you treat betting as a business transaction it is easier to remove your emotions and mistakes.
Take emotion out of your gambling, never bet on your favourite team, it clouds your judgement. There is a good reason bookies have betting kiosks at football grounds, they know the emotional attachment to a team clouds the supporters better judgement and these betting booths are the biggest cash cows available.
2. There is NO such thing as the “perfect system”.
There are thousands of “systems” available on the internet. Every punter will tell you they have the perfect system, unfortunately there is no one system to guarantee success.
Bookmakers on the other hand control their odds and work off something called the 110% market, which means that regardless of the result they will make a minimum 10% profit. In my time working at online bookmakers there was in fact rarely a day when the profit was less than 20% and was normally nearer 30%.
Bookmakers as you can imagine are very stringent to their market percentages and, as such, change their prices accordingly, The are constantly monitoring each other’s prices and very rarely leave gaps for people to bet across markets.
Therefore whilst some people believe they have a system to beat the bookmakers they don’t. Unless you are making the market, i.e. a bookmaker or you are selling a “system” there is no guaranteed way to make a profit – long term.
3. No substitute for knowledge
Rather than wasting money and time purchasing someone else’s SYSTEM, pick one sport, and even one market within a sport and become as knowledgeable as you can. If you don’t know what you are betting on you have no chance of being profitable long term.
If you have an interest in the English 1st division and make yourself as knowledgeable as you can and become “a specialist”. Make sure you know more about it than “the market makers” sitting in their office at Ladbrokes or William Hill, who are not rocket scientists, just ordinary people like you or I who happen to have an interest at sport and chosen to have their career at Ladbrokes. These people are setting the odds on hundreds markets, by being a specialist in one makes it easier for beat them.
4. Tipsters who claim to offer percentage accuracy are talking horse shit!
If you come across a website or tipster who claims that they can be “65% sure Liverpool will beat Blackpool at home” or that “Sunderland have a 25% chance of beating Wigan away” log off immediately.
There are no statistical systems that can accurately predict results, because trust me these people would not need to waste time selling their systems online, they would just be raking in the money and have no need to sell their idea to others. If these systems were so foul proof they would not need other people to take their risk for them.
I set up a tipster website with a friend, who was an incredibly successful gambler and sold his tips. Although he gave some great tips, what he soon realised was that he was far more profitable betting himself. Gambling is not necessary about the horse you chose to win or the football team you chose to back, but the price you bet on this team, the emotions you attach to your bet and very importantly how you manage money.
5. The most vulnerable punter is a winning punter.
When you are winning you feel absolutely unstoppable, you are the nuts, nothing can go wrong. You can buy all the drinks, your next month’s rent is paid and you can start dreaming about that holiday, what could go wrong.
Stop. Go back to section 1. Your emotions are involved again, how could your judgement not be impaired with all these great faults going through your mind. Take yourself back, enjoy the feeling and remember every bet is a losing bet.
Imagine you are a footballer you score the first goal in front of 50,000 screaming fans, you feel amazing, you are the bollocks. Then your captain comes and taps you on the shoulder and reminds you there are still 70 minutes to go and you must focus on the job in hand, imagine it is still 0-0. The most professional sportsmen/women can switch back in an instant and finish the job in hand, Alex Ferguson is the master of making his players do this, Tiger Woods is phenomenal at it. As a gambler you must be able to do the same.
If you wish to start building a betting pot and putting some of these betting rules into practise we suggest matched betting by taking advantage of free bets that bookmakers have to offer.
