A basic record of all bets made is a MUST.
This will give you a much needed, at-a-glance guide, to which bets are money makers and which are money losers. After a reasonable period you’ll notice that there are patterns emerging. This will then help you to keep to profitable bets.
Those of you who are "Computer Literate", will be able to make your own Spreadsheet. Others, like me, will need to do it by hand.
We’ll need a few columns to cover
Date — Home Team — Away Team — Bet Made (1 or 2 or X) etc. — Stake — Profit/Loss — Cumulative Profit/Loss.
I would also recommend keeping the odds offered for the three outcomes of each game. If you’re inclined to use the betting exchanges, keep their prices, too. These will be invaluable when you do an audit of your results. More often than not, a pattern will emerge that will show that you do well backing homes when the away team is quoted within a certain range, but not so well when the odds are outside that range. It might sound like bunkum but these patterns do emerge.
Going off track for a minute. Did you know that odds-on favourites outside the range of 4/6 to 4/11 are more likely to lose than those within that range?
If a pattern like this shows up in your betting method it will give you a little more of an edge.
Keeping accurate records will definitely stand you in good stead over any period of time.
Assessing Form.
You don’t need to be a maths wizard to do this. The idea is to give you some knowledge of how you look at the form of the teams in a match. When you balance the form you’ll soon find that you can predict pretty closely to the experts prices.
It might not appear much on the surface but it will increase your ability at forecasting, too.
Firstly you must decide which factors you are going to consider and give them a value.
At first this shouldn’t be too convaluted. Once you’re happy with the way things are going, you can then become more "picky".
Try this.
Recent Form. Up to 60 pts
Head2Head Form up to 10 pts.
Players Missing/ Returning up to 10pts.( a minus figure is possible ).
Goal scoring form up to 10 pts.
Keeping clean sheets up to 10 pts.
It’s possible to have 100 pts but very rarely will this happen.
Try rating a few matches this way to give yourself a "feel" of things.
Next time we’ll find a way to fit the odds to the rating figures.
Cyril
