Over the course of the past few months, I've had several requests on here for tips since I do alright from betting most of the time. What I propose to do is supply what in my opinion are the fair odds for all of the English football matches from the Premier League down to League Two. I'll post them up a few hours before the games in this thread over the course of the season (and via email too if people want an email list as well), and will identify the teams that in my opinion people should back and the ones they should lay (or just avoid betting on if you prefer). I'll keep a brief record of all the bets I'm recommending so that people can see how it's all doing. I will post up a few long-term bets as well.

A decent bet right now I think would be Wolves each-way @ 14/1 in the Championship outright market, which is generally available at the likes of Ladbrokes, William Hill and a couple of others. Alternatively, Ladbrokes' 9/2 on them to get promoted isn't a bad price either. The promotion bet has a better payout if they don't win the league but still get promoted and gives them the chance to finish as low as sixth and win the playoffs.

I like Wolves' signings so far, they had a decent second half to last season and they have some outstanding younger players who will only get better this season. There is the promise of more money to spend on decent signings as well. The Championship will be wide open next season with no obvious outstanding candidate. QPR are being over-rated due to their extremely wealthy owners, who I don't think are going to spend huge sums on players. Wolves are regular under-achievers but should give you a good run for your money if you take them each-way or to get promoted.

I'll keep an eye out for more bets on the long-term markets over the coming weeks.

Brilliant, cant wait for your tips blue. I wouldnt mind being emailed them either. I may miss some of the tips tho when im traveling away to Queen Of The South, Ross County and the likes.

What is the point in making up your own odds when the bookies (who will have far more of a clue than you) already do it? Perhaps Im missing the point here.

Why not just state your tips and record your profit and loss?

Dont mean to knock you but are you sure that youve "had several requests on here for tips since I do alright from betting most of the time". I'll be honest with you, I've never heard of you and will not be blindly following your tips.

Uh oh...

Cheers blue; you're tips are appreciated here

I think it's safe to say that Blue does alright. Donald Trump would like to do as "alright."

What is the point in making up your own odds when the bookies (who will have far more of a clue than you) already do it? Perhaps Im missing the point here. Yes, see below comment

Why not just state your tips and record your profit and loss? Because it's about value betting, you need to know what price represents value before plunging in

Dont mean to knock you but are you sure that youve "had several requests on here for tips since I do alright from betting most of the time". Yes, they are on various other threads that I'm not going to bother searching for I'll be honest with you, I've never heard of you where have you been the last 6 months? and will not be blindly following your tips. No-one's asking you to blindly follow them, but they are another tool to be used in making money through betting

Understatement of the century.

youre tips are very welcome here blue

I see others have actually answered Haitch "queries" for me I'll state my intentions to make everything clear anyway.

What is the point in making up your own odds when the bookies (who will have far more of a clue than you) already do it? Perhaps Im missing the point here.
This statement is just bizarre. You have to have some idea of what the true odds are to be able to bet successfully. Looking at bookmakers' odds in itself is pointless unless you know whether the odds on offer represent a good bet or not. I would also tend to disagree that bookmakers know better than me. They have a way of pricing things up that often gets it very wrong. If you put the effort in, which I do, you can identify pricing errors. I produce my own odds before any bookmaker has them online, which is even better still in my opinion. More than one bookmaker has offered me a job as a football odds compiler in the past based on bets I've placed with them. I am one of Betfair's most successful football layers. Bookmakers can get away with offering rubbish odds to the mug punters in their shops, but you can't on Betfair or else you'll get no bets matched. If you post competitive prices up on Betfair and get it wrong you'll soon lose all your money.


Why not just state your tips and record your profit and loss?
This is effectively what I'm going to do. I shall calculate my odds before the first bookmaker prices are out each week and place bets very early on the exchanges, but I'm not prepared to make my information public too early for obvious reasons. If I'm stating what I think the odds should be for each game, you can then work out which bets I'm recommending from looking at the best available odds. I'll point out which teams I think are worth backing and which are worth laying on the day of the game at the available odds at that point.


Dont mean to knock you but are you sure that youve "had several requests on here for tips since I do alright from betting most of the time". I'll be honest with you, I've never heard of you and will not be blindly following your tips.
I've had several PM's on here over the past few months asking for tips, as well as a few requests in the threads. I really don't have to bother myself doing this as I've given up betting on Scottish football to save time, so I've no real reason to visit this forum at all. However, I like the general atmosphere on this forum as 99% of people are friendly and helpful. This is the main reason for starting this thread, I'm not trying to draw attention to myself and am not looking for pats on the back or anything like that. I'll be offering this information to anyone who wants to make use of it. If you don't like it, don't read it. I don't imagine many people will be following what I say religiously, but it may be useful to some people to check against their own bets that they're thinking of placing. Hopefully it will help some people do slightly better from betting. Any comments and questions are welcome from anyone at any time, thanks for taking the time to respond Haitch and everyone else.

I bet you wished you never bothered blue!!

Btw, I fancy Sheff Utd at 14/1. Championship's alays difficult though.

As most of us on here, with one obvious exception, appreciate (and envy) blues punting would this merit being pinned.

Can't have Sheffield United, mainly because I don't particularly rate Kevin Blackwell. I also think their squad has far too many has-beens in there who were never that good in the first place. Wolves have IMO three of the best young players in the league - Hennessey, Kightly and Ebanks-Blake. All three were exceptional last season and have the potential to get better (hopefully Kightly will stay fit this time). Jones, Vokes and Stearman all look decent signings too, although Vokes is an unknown at this level. Mick McCarthy is no Arsene Wenger, but the last two full seasons he had at this level with Sunderland with a squad with a similar profile, they finished third and first.

By no means a certainty, but at 14/1 worth a go I think.

At first glances, I think Palace might be a decent each-way shout. They are 9/1.

I just think Neil Warnock knows the league inside-out, has got a decent squad, and managed to help Palace to the play-offs last season, despite the fact that he was appointed, they were near relegation.

I was about to post something very similar.

Good mate of mine is a Palace fan and I was talking to him over the weekend. He thinks they'll struggle for goals next season, with Morrison unlikely to still be at Selhurst before the season starts. Ben Watson is also about to go into the last year of his contract and has been reluctant to sign a new deal, so Jordan is likely to insist he's sold now. Warnock is also talking about building his team around Scowcroft, which doesn't inspire much confidence.

Completely disagree.

Morrison has had his contract offer withdrawn and looks likely to leave. John Bostock will be joining Tottenham pretty soon too I would imagine. I don't think Crystal Palace will have any significant money to invest in better players either. I'm sure they'll find a way to challenge for a top six place, but I think they'll struggle to make the top three.

One of the conditions of the sale of Wolves to Steve Morgan, was that he invested £30m in the playing staff, so I would imagine there are one or two more signings to come there.

This pleases me somewhat.



I do agree that they may struggle for goals next season, but I think they did so last season as well, and even with the 'handicap' of the first part of the season, they managed to grind out results sufficiently to make the play-offs.



I can see your points there, but I just feel that they (Palace) may be able to 'grind' to the Top 6 (perhaps not Top 6 as you say), but in with a shout imo.

I see what you mean about Wolves. IIRC, Hennessey is the young Welsh goalkeeper who had a phenomonal Goals Conceded/Games Played ratio during a loan spell at Stockport last season?

I don't know much about Ebanks-Blake, but I know Kightly is rated highly. I reckon they are also a decent shout each-way, as are a number of teams, I suppose.

Ebanks-Blake will be playing the Premier League in the 2009/10 season whether Wolves go up or not in the coming season IMO. Might be worth an interest for top scorer too. He was exceptional for Plymouth last season, then moved to Wolves in January and scored a couple of brilliant goals. Started his career at Man Utd and only left Plymouth because he had a £1.5m release clause in his contract, which looks a bargain. Hennessey was on loan at Stockport the season before last and most pundits rated him the best goalkeeper in the Championship last season.

Palace do have their merits. They will be hard to beat and will be competitive and also have a very good youth system. The problem is that most of their promising players are 16-18 so probably aren't ready to make an impact every week. I can see myself ending up with similar bets on Palace game to game this season - laying them at home to teams in the bottom half of the league and back the draw, while probably not opposing them on their travels too much. Even when they started doing better last season when Warnock took over, they struggled to score goals. If Morrison does go as looks likely, someone else will have to come in or else they probably won't make the top six. Scowcroft is not going to be a prolific scorer at this level. I just can't see any way that Palace are a good bet at all, but it would be boring if everyone agreed. I hope some bookmaker offers a season match bet Palace v Wolves with Palace slight favourites

The problem with a lot of the young players is they might suffer a little dip too, after the initial boost they get from playing in the first team. Guys like Scannell and Moses are cracking prospects but they don't have that unknown factor about them this season. Nick Carle should be a decent replacement for Watson (if he goes) but Warnock struggled to ever really bring a prolific scorer to Bramall Lane, bar maybe Andy Gray, so I'm not convinced he'll suddenly manage it with Palace. In the season that United went up, he seemed to have tens of strikers who all luckily weighed in with a few but I don't think he'll be able to go down that route this season. He'll have to strike it lucky, as Trevor Francis did with AJ.

They've still got Shefki Kuqi though

I would be interested in blue's thoughts on League Two. I got on Shrewsbury a couple of weeks ago when they were 25/1 at PP. They'd just signed Grant Holt from Forest and since then have signed Richard Walker from Bristol Rovers, who scored I think 24 goals during their promotion season in 2007. They look pretty formidable up front and have also signed Paul Murray who seemed to do quite well at Gretna, Shane Sheriff, a highly rated defender at Tranmere, and Blackpool's veteran centre half Michael Jackson, who played over 20 times in the Championship last season. They've been cut considerably, now a best price of 12/1, at the bookies I use anyway. A few minutes after I did a double with Leeds I went back in to do an e/w and the price had been cut to 18/1. Still felt it was worth it but raging at myself, the e/w was the obvious bet.

Bradford look to have signed some quality too, another well regarded Tranmere player amongst them(Tranmere to go down?) and they seem rightly to be the favourites.

I am said mug punter, with no experience of Betfair, but I am always happy to take advice on how to win more money, and don't really understand why anyone else wouldn't.

Am I right in thinking that the reason you will be able to come up with your own odds is because rather than calculating them for a whole fixtures card (like a bookies) you will be restricting it to specific matches/leagues that you are particularly knowledgable about?

I only recently joined Betfair and am in the same boat.

By the way Blue, if you can be arsed explaining, how did you first get into football gambling and when did you realise you could actually make a few quid from it?

I am more than aware I am no gambling God but for those who are just new to Betfair it shouldn't really matter too much.

I would say I was pretty good at predicting and compliling odds, but when it comes to serious laying you have to be better than 'pretty good' as blue said if you get it wrong by even a few percent and you can lose money very quickly indeed.

For the gambler making to look a steady few quid every week with bets of £20-£50 as most people on here seem to be I would avoid laying altogether and stick to identifying 'mistakes' in pricing as has been previously said.

I'm not football expert and am but a lowly student but have made £3842 profit since opening my Betfair account in November 2006, which is 20 months ago, so an average profit of approx £190 a month.

Ps - It may look like it took ages for me to type this, but I went out to chip a gold ball about my garden in the middle of writing it

Thanks for that Fudge. My weekly accy/trixie usually ranges from £30 to £50, although have been know to wager upwards of £150 on singles.

I'll be keeping a close eye on this forum next season.

Is it sad that i'm looking forward to the first full card of next season?

Possibly, but I feel the exact same.

... and cheers, blue4578, any edge we can get over the b*****ding bookies is much appreciated.

I'm already on Shrewsbury @ 22/1, made the move the day they signed Holt and Jackson. I don't even look at Paddy Power any more because they just laugh at me when I try to bet there. League Two will be wide open because all of the relegated teams (Luton, Gillingham, Bournemouth and Port Vale) have lost key players and don't have a lot of money. Gillingham will probably do best of the relegated teams, but there are no teams with very large budgets since MK Dons and Peterborough went up. Shrewsbury will probably be the biggest spenders, which is no guarantee of success, but it always helps. I'm not sure if Walker and Sheriff will make much impact but they're better than what Shrewsbury had last season. My only worry is that Paul Simpson is Mr Excuses. It's never his fault when it all goes wrong, I don't really rate him as a manager. He did do well with Carlisle in the lower leagues so maybe he is more suited to a club like Shrewsbury than Preston.

My biggest problem is I only take a slight interest in English lower leagues so your insight (and others) has been quite interesting.

I've found my biggest winnings have been in the Scottish lower leagues, in which I agree the bookies tend to be a tad 'lazy' with there odds, not really taking into account form etc so I'd imagine they might do the same down South.

I think it's best to maybe monitor the squads for another week or so before making a move.

I'm quite impressed with all of the replies to this, I thought this thread would've fallen off the bottom by now

There is actually an interview with me on a well-known gambling website which goes into quite a lot of detail about my betting history and so on, but it was done around three years ago and some things have changed since then. Linking to it would also reveal my identity, which isn't a big deal, but I have a couple of online stalkers (I'm not joking) that I don't really want to know this new user name. Anyone wanting the link just PM me [edit - scrap that idea as I've ended up writing far more than planned!].


To answer the questions above without waffling on too much:

I started off betting because I've always had an interest in football and maths. I've now got a masters degree in maths too. Like a lot of people I started off betting on the Grand National. I still remember my first bet, which was on West Tip which ended up winning. Looking that up just now, that was in 1986 so I was 6 years old at the time When I was about 13 I'd moved on to get my mum to place £1 accumulators for me at the local Coral shop every Saturday. My first decent win was about £115 when I got a 7-fold up because Ian Durrant scored a last minute winner for Rangers to win 1-0 against Kilmarnock at Ibrox. I can't be bothered to look that up but probably in 1993/94 season I would guess. What did I do with the money? It was very early in the season, so I put £100 on the Scottish League Cup games the following midweek. I think Falkirk drew with Berwick to cost me a fortune on about a 13-fold. In those days I didn't use the shops coupons as I wasn't old enough to go into the shops, so my mum got me betting slips and I wrote out a list of teams. I didn't have a clue how much I was going to be winning if I won either. From reading some of the posts on here over the past few months, it sounds like some people on here bet in very similar ways even now! For me though, this was back in the days of minimum 5-folds if you included a home win and 10% betting tax. Singles weren't an option (apart from on cup games) so I didn't win often but when I did it was a decent amount. Not a lot changed in the way I bet from the ages of 13-18 as you still had to do minimum 5-folds and the internet was still in its infancy. I remember while doing my A-levels me and a friend used to go to the local betting shop and do reverse forecasts on greyhound racing and bet randomly on horses. We didn't do very well, but by this point I was starting to do alright on football.

In my first year at uni I opened a few phone betting accounts, which gave you more options when it came to getting the best odds. Not long after Victor Chandler moved offshore and suddenly tax free betting was available. Losing the 9% betting tax made a huge difference. I then opened a few online accounts. I remember that my first one was Coral, and their website then looked like a 10-year old had knocked it up in his lunch break at school. The big change for me in my betting came when I started betting much larger sums. From the age of about 16-19, I was staking anywhere between £30 and £100 on a Saturday. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but I started gambling much larger sums due to having a student loan. I started doing £500 a time and wasn't doing too badly, but a bad run saw me at one point down to my last £500. Rather than give up I put a double on Crystal Palace and Man Utd one midweek. If it had lost I was done forever probably. Palace won 3-0 but Man Utd were 1-1 with 9 minutes left. Paul Scholes scored, then Dwight Yorke added one in injury time. Without those goals I wouldn't be here today. Sometimes you have to take risks, but looking back I was certainly reckless. After that point I never looked back though. At that point my football betting consisted of betting doubles and trebles on favourites mainly. I also didn't really bet on any other sports at this point. I was a regular poster on a few betting forums around the same time and because of this I got jobs writing for a website and also writing for a magazine in Malaysia. I never actually saw the magazine but they were paying me £400 a month for one hour of work per week so I wasn't complaining.

Oh dear, I said I wasn't going to waffle on too much

Anyway, betting mainly doubles and trebles on favourites, I probably won £60,000 my last year at university. Rather than take the investment banking job I'd been offered in London, I decided to gamble full time for a while. I also set up a subscription tips website to keep me entertained and took over another website from a friend of mine. I started betting more on cricket around this time (2002 and 2003) as I knew a lot about it and I did very well on it. Things basically continued like this until around 2006.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to get bets on at bookmakers. There are only so many identities you can borrow from friends and family, and the biggest problem for me had become not actually finding good bets that would make a profit, it was actually getting these bets on. There are certainly markets now that I know I can make a fortune on, but I just can't get a penny on them. One example is the Over/Under batsman's runs markets that Bet365 offer on cricket in-running. Their odds compilers are utterly stupid, but if you open a new account in a new name and have one good day, they'll slash the limits to nothing.

The difficulty getting bets on has led me over the past couple of years to totally change the way I went about betting. For years I used Betfair as effectively just another bookmaker. I'd decide to place a bet and check the best odds at all the bookmakers and place it where the best odds were, which sometimes happened to be Betfair. I didn't use it a whole lot though as I was doing doubles and trebles mainly. I then got into betting on baseball. I found that the margins on the sport were very tight and that it was possible to become a layer on Betfair. In the summer of 2006, I began laying both teams in each match, effectively making my own book and acting as a bookmaker. It was ridiculously successful, although I'd almost stumbled into baseball betting by accident. My biggest strength over the years I've been betting has been pricing up football matches. I used to stay up really late on Friday nights and for pretty much every match I could estimate what the price was going to be, pretty much spot on in every occasion. There is a difference of course to what you think the price should be, and what it will actually be. If you know where the market is going to go and whether that price is right or wrong, you're most of the way to being successful.

So last year I started laying all of the English and Scottish football games. Pretty much every game across all eight divisions. The only regret that I have is that I wish I'd been doing it much, much earlier. If you put bets up on Betfair and leave them, you'd be amazed by what gets taken sometimes. I've been to a lot of VIP Betfair functions and met people who for example use bots to monitor bookmakers prices and then lay those prices, but slightly lower, on Betfair. There is one group of four guys who have a Betfair balance of £1.2m (I've seen it) and make around £40,000 per month doing just that. I remember a few years ago that you could occasionally lay a 7/2 shot at Evens at 2:55pm on a Saturday on an English League One game for example. That's because there wasn't so much money in the market and there were people on Betfair who had all their money in Betfair and were desperate to get the bets on whatever the price. These days you can't do that as it's a whole lot more competitive and there is a lot more money floating around. If I'd been doing what I do now four or five years ago, I'd probably be worth two or three times as much as I am now.

I've given up betting on Scottish football now as there just isn't the money in Betfair at the prices I want and bookmakers won't take my bets. I'm also trying to spend less time betting and more time enjoying the money I make, so I've given up stuff like women's tennis too and betting on smaller men's tournaments. Eventually I will end up betting just on the four English divisions. The only downside to being a big layer at Betfair is that you need a lot of money to cover all of your bets. For example if you want to back and lay each out for a maximum liability and maximum win of £1000 per bet, this would take you approximately £100,000 on a Saturday. It's well worth it though because these days out of 46 English games on an average weekend, I'll probably have bets on at least 35 of them, with significant bets on around 20 or so. All of these bets are at very good prices because only probably 25-35% of the bets I put up actually get matched. They're all speculative backs and lays. I'm not actually decided which teams to bet on, I'm totally at the mercy of the people coming onto Betfair and placing their bets. Sometimes at 3:30pm on a Saturday watching Soccer Saturday, someone scores and I don't know whether to be pleased or gutted With so many bets at favourable odds, I win probably at least 90% of weekends. Things are much less variable if you have 30 bets at good odds rather than maybe two trebles or something like that. Betting two trebles you'll end up losing all your stakes a lot of the time, with the occasional 400% profit or better. These days I prefer the slow, steady profit. The key to it all is making your own prices and being prepared to back your judgement. In almost every market on Betfair, the earlier you can do this the better.

I remember when I first started on Betfair, I thought that 100,000 points was an impossible target. That's what you needed to get to 2% commission, although it's since increased to 150,000. Maintaining 2% commission these days with 150,000 points equates to winning and losing bets each week totalling £112,500 on average. Obviously paying 2% commission rather than 5% makes a huge difference to the prices I can offer. I probably wouldn't get half the bets matched that I do if I was on 5%. Last week I was on a fraction under 225,000 points, which seemed impossible to me not so long ago. Betfair are very nice to you too when you become one of their big customers. I get invited to probably 2 or 3 of their corporate events per month at least. Not so long ago they took about 8 of us to the French Open tennis finals in Paris. First class Eurostar, amazing hotel which Ana Ivanovic was also staying in and they footed a £2000 restaurant bill for 6 of us mid-table and the_russian will vouch for Betfair's hospitality, although the events they attended were slightly below par by the usual standards. This is just an added bonus though, as Betfair's customer service at times isn't up to scratch. I keep saying that I wish they'd run their markets better instead of spending a fortune on hospitality instead.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't waffle on but I have. I wouldn't have normally, but I'm having a few days away so I'm sitting in a hotel room currently and would've been twiddling my thumbs if I hadn't been typing this. I'm not going to check what I've written so I'm sure there are some mistakes and some things which don't make sense. All comments and questions are welcome.

Count me in for the next spare hospitality ticket!

Awesome story!

The moral of the story: If you want to make serious money from betting then become a bookie!

Nah, seriously, that's a good read when you're sitting in work doing some monotonous task and waiting for the weekend - cheers. Sopunds like you've really put a lot of time and effort into your betting and it's obviously paid off.

I've done quite a decent standard of maths at uni so at a push working out odds and permutations is reachable for me... unfortunately I have no patience and nowhere near enough knowledge of the market to do what you do. Hats off to you

Imagine if the page had crashed when you were trying to post that! Very interesting reading though.

Very interesting stuff!

So its that easy then?

This, to me, is what this forum is all about. We're all in it to win some money off the bookies, some of us small amounts and others big but the key to that is knowledge and knowing when a price does not represent value. Im in no way a big gambler but look forward to reading Blue and everyone elses posts in the coming season.

Incidently, I do believe that Wolves are a great shout for the Championship. Although in such a tight league I'll probably back them e/w.

I'm not gonna quote Blues post because the page would take an age to load, but definitely Gambling Post Of The Year so far.

My summary in Sports Betting is simple. I've been a Semi-Pro poker player for about 4 years now, playing in levels between $1-$2 up to at my peak last year $10-$20 in No Limit games.

As you'd expect, being in a gambling community, it lead me to the Books as I'd often be playing with Pro American Bettors. Becoming friends with these people helped me get tips in Basketball (Worldwide), NFL and CFL. From there I began betting on sports I knew nothing about, such as Cricket, MMA (Which I now have a knowledge of) and even football. Don't get me wrong, I'm a football fanatic, but often I wasn't taking the best prices and just throwing dumb bets in.

Since then, I've cut down the the sports betting, but I'm obviously open to advice from guys higher up. I await more excellent posts Blue.

Please post your tips blue throughout the football season. Would be appreciated.

excellent post blue a football betting genius

That sentence gave me a semi.

Outstanding.

I was lucky enough to go to Wembley for the championship play off final with Mr Blue, great guy, and the forum could learn a lot from him as you all know. I did try to tell him that hat-trick bets and 3-3 correct score bets were the way forward, maybe thats why my betfair balance stands at £0.00 and i'm up at 6am every day cutting grass

I'm definately going to try and take gambling a bit more seriously this coming season and at least try to make a profit and abandon the "quick fix pie in the sky" type bets, and I think this forum and the guys who post here will make that much easier to do.

Blue, excellent post as always. Was wondering if you ever bother with goalscorer bets or is it just the win/draw/win or asian market you dabble in?

My pal tipped me off about Blackburn to go down at 14/1. Apparently Paul Ince is a bit shit. Seeing as his first signing was Robbie Fowler I might have some of that.

Fascinating stuff - I'm by no means much of a gambler and even less off a succesful one. I'm not even sure I understand how Betfair works . But after years off I had a few bets at the Derby and Euros with mixed results. Got me interested again in a small way and I suspect I'll be popping in here for advice and tips next season. It certainly looks the place to be.

Thanks for the positive responses

I've been unable to reply for a couple of days because I happened to be on a little visit to the Western Isles. I couldn't get signal for my mobile broadband in one place then my car decided to suddenly die. Not the place you want to be calling the RAC out to if you can help it. Home at last though about 15 hours later than planned. Damn Scotland and its remote places




Copied and pasted to a word document a few times just in case




Very rarely, but in the 2003-04 season Andy Johnson was scoring a hatful of goals for Crystal Palace, particularly around Christmas and the New Year. I latched onto the fact that you were still getting 5/1 or 11/2 on him to score first and around 11/10 any time. He was first scorer an awful lot of the time so just placing that bet every week made a lot of money. Les Ferdinand was at Leicester the same season, and I believe that he scored more goals per minute on the pitch than any other player in the Premier League that season, yet was still at least 7/1 to score first/last every game. This game in particular: http://www.soccerbase.com/results3.sd?gameid=413795 made me a lot of money. I think it was live on Sky and I just had a hunch for it. Bet more than I usually did on the market. Took him first scorer and last scorer, and boy was I pleased when the equaliser was given as an own goal If you look at Ferdinand's stats that season you'll see how many times he scored first or last.

I don't look at scorer markets now because they're difficult bets to place on exchanges for any decent sum and bookmakers just don't want to know. Obviously you can look for trends or things like defenders playing up front or being penalty takers. Yakubu scored more goals than anyone else in the Premier League other than Thierry Henry from 2004-2007 yet was/is often available at decent odds to score first for example.

I'm also quite a fan of the total goals markets and occasionally HT/FT. Correct scores are also worth considering for low-scoring teams - for example Chelsea 1-0 and 2-0 at home in recent seasons.




Not a bad shout that, I just saw the Fowler signing and thought exactly the same thing before I'd read the forum. The best previous example in recent years that I can think of is Charlton. Curbishley was manager there for many years and they were a solid mid-table team in the Premier League when he left. They appointed Dowie and he brought in about 10 new players the same summer and they ended up having another two managers that season and getting relegated. The moral being that in my opinion, if you're a mid-table team in the Premier League and you try to make too many changes at once, it can go horribly wrong. With Mark Hughes being replaced as manager by Paul Ince as well as Bentley wanting to go and Santa Cruz, Samba and a few others being linked with moves, there could be a lot of changes over the summer at Blackburn. They probably won't get relegated, but worth a small go at big odds. Other options include selling their points total on the spreads and/or opposing them in season match bets.

There's nothing wrong with being mid-table

Anyway, thanks for that post, you've told me a lot of that before but it was refreshing to read.
Would also like to add that if you are a £2 a week 16 team accumulator person, and you're happy with that, then please don't feel intimidated by these posts, they are mainly aimed at people that want to make money from gambling rather than do it for entertainment.
Feel free to post your bets in the 'Bets' thread each weekend.

That was me last season. I've not been gambling for long, but i just do it to make matchdays more interesting. Although it does seem that some folk who post on this forum simply cannot understand why people do that.. Twice last season i've been very close with big accys. The first was worth over a million quid, and i noticed that at half time every team was up, i nearly shat myself. 3 teams ended up fucking me, but the sheer excitement i was feeling during the last 45 was worth it.

Another time was a 13 team accy for £2 that was worth £1,960.... Wrexham v Mansfield.. Two very low scoring teams, with Mansfield being just that little bit shittier than Wrexham, so i went for the home win.. 0-0. Gutted. Especially when in the 87th minute one of my other teams took the lead to take it down to that game.

But this year i'm going to gamble with the aim to make a bit of money rather than amuse myself, I can't afford to stick on huge singles or doubles, so i'm thinking i'll go slow and steady. Granted, i'll still leave a few quid aside each week for the little things that amuse me, like the odd 8 team accy, and a few quid for roulette or the puggies when i'm in the pub.

I know what the reply will be to the last part of this post, but if losing a tenner over the course of a weekend in puggies and roulette doesn't bother me, it shouldn't really bother anyone else.

But yes, I'll be popping into this thread with a certain degree of regularity over the course of the season. So the advice in this thread is much appreciated. Be it from Mr. Blue or whoever else.

Missed a couple of things that I wanted to respond to the other night.




That probably isn't far from the truth. Most people who make big money from gambling have to do it on exchanges as bookmakers won't take their bets. Nearly all of these do it by being big layers. A large proportion of these also use software to automatically lay bets.




It's not the size of your balance, it's what you do with it that counts Other people, myself included, make more than that. I was just using those guys as an example of what people get up to that the man in the street may not know about.



Toma_BullyWee and mid-table are correct when they say if you're happy doing your 16-team accumulators then no one has any right to be critical of that. I remember when I was 17 or so at college, I had a fiver on about a 20-team accumulator and was within Sunderland beating Norwich of winning about £400,000. The thing that most people do not appreciate with accumulators though is that the bookmakers profit margin increases expontentially for every team that you add. As long as you know that you're not getting anything like the fair price, then fair enough. If you're the person that appears in a William Hill press release having won half a million, I guess you won't be that bothered about that

I would imagine that most people posting here are doing so because they want to do slightly better from betting though. I'm going to post up what I think the fair odds are for all the English games. I'll not be placing any multiple bets but I reckon for accumulator backers it might be useful for working out which teams to avoid. For example if a team is best price 1.5 and I think the fair price is 1.6, then I'm saying to avoid this team.

Blue, I saw you were tipping Wolves, what do you think of the loss of Freddy Eastwood? Given, he didn't have the best of seasons last season for Wolves, but neither did the team in general.

Will have no impact. I think that the fee they've got for him is pretty reasonable, which will allow them to re-invest in other players. Wolves had too many strikers to start with (they've signed 10 in the past year I believe I read somewhere) so getting rid of one was probably a good move.

I should also make it clear that this is not a large bet for me. I place thousands of football bets per season and I'm sticking less on Wolves than I would on a single 90 minute match bet. I just mentioned it as it was something that looked a decent price.

Just seen this thread. A very good read.