The Weekend Wager from Secret Betting Club

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Darren Hall

1. Mike Says..

In this column, Secret Betting Club co-editor and professional gambler Mike Bishop discusses some of the weeks most topical betting issues.

Why England always lose at football

I’ve recently been thumbing my way through a brilliant book called ‘Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained’, which has inspired me to think differently about my betting on the beautiful game.

Now you would think a book entitled ‘Why England Lose’ might just contains 2 words… “Emile and Heskey”… but actually it tackles many of our (often wholly baseless) theories on football. Most England fans for example think that we underperform on the national stage, but as the book explains…as a nation we actually if anything do better than the stats say we should!

Beyond just England though, the book reveals some great stats for betting, such as the fact that home advantage globally is worth a head-start of roughly 2/3rds a goal per game. It’s not going to be bed time reading for the likes of Robbie Savage, but it is a great read if you like to think beyond footballing clichés.

Thankfully though you don’t need a master’s degree in Economics like Arsene Wenger to make use of stats in football (or even know how to sign a half-decent goalkeeper). Here are some ready to use resources and tips on how to apply them to your betting.

The Fink Tank Ratings

The Fink Tank ratings provided by the boffins at Dectech, bring together a number of factors to assess the percentage probability of a particular team winning, drawing or losing. We’ve been keeping track of the performance of these ratings here: http://secretbettingclub.com/blog/category/fink-tank/

Our test is simple, if the predicted chance of success is better than that implied by the bookies, you take the bet. So far the approach is working very well with a return of 31.55 points for the season with an ROI (Profit on Turnover) of 13%.

Kick off Percentage Stats

I was also put onto another great resource to help you with this in the form of http://www.kickoff.co.uk/, which lists the percentage chances in each Premier League game using easy on the eye pie charts.

They’ve also got a neat little tool which converts the percentage predictions into odds for you and vice versa. For example a 10% chance equates to 9/1 and this can be really useful for working out your bets.

Soccer Stats Website

There are many different stats websites out there but one my favourites is at http://www.soccerstats.com, which lists plenty of useful and easy to read information on all the top football leagues.

You can get all the current and historical seasonal performance for each team, including stats on under/over goals, clean sheets, scoring times and much more besides.

So…are you a Statto, Team Reader, or a bit of both?

Putting it simply, there are perhaps three main ways to make money making your own football bets:

Pure stats – Using numbers, algorithms and nothing else.
Team knowledge – Gut feel, team news, team formations, team play etc.
Combining stats with team knowledge – Use a bit of both.

My own football bets in the English Premier League for example use a bit of both, combining my reading of a team’s psychology with stats to generate my bets. I also find it extremely useful to read books like Why England Lose to give me more factual information, rather than be impacted by short-term bias we often see in mainstream media.

On the other hand, if you are like my colleague Dan and have no interest in the game itself (I have seen him play football and it reminds me of Ron Atkinson’s quote about Carlton Palmer – he can trap it further than he can kick it!), then focusing on the numbers can be a useful approach.

Using a pattern called the home underdogs, in conjunction with the Fink Tank ratings, Dan has been using a mix of Asian Handicap strategies to cover the draw where appropriate as a way to improve on straight home or away betting.

For example, last week the Fink Tank ratings and the home underdog pattern had West Brom as a value pick against Arsenal. Rather than risk it all on the unlikely home win, he went for a West Brom/ Draw double chance with odds of 2.15. This meant that a profit was made even if the game ended in a draw. It’s early days with this testing, but it looks like the approach has potential.

Stats – Putting it all together.

Whatever way you look at it, there are many ways to use (or not use) football stats. It all depends which angle you wish to take and we have plenty more help and resources for you to use for your own football betting as a member of the Secret Betting Club such as…

Our Offshore & Asian Bookmaker Guide – get the best odds by betting away from the UK high street
Asian Handicap & Cover Draw Betting in Football – Learn about how to use the popular Asian Handicap style of betting
Ante-post Football Betting Guide – How to make money betting in the ante-post markets
The Best Football Stats & Prediction Sites – Lists all the top commercial and free betting stats resources you need to know about.

Even Better Still – Let A Tipster Do The Work For You!

It’s worth mentioning as well that if all the talk about generating your own bets leaves you cold, we also have a whole host of recommended football tipsters that we monitor at the Secret Betting Club.

Between the top 7 tipsters this season they have made over 186 pts profit and you can track my latest blog post on this from a few weeks back here

Get access to all the details on who these top 7 tipsters are, plus a whole host more football betting wise by joining us at the Secret Betting Club today.

Until next week…

Mike Bishop

Your Ultimate Betting Resource

The very latest issue of the Secret Betting Club newsletter is out NOW and features everything you need to know about making money including…

Betting on the move – Our tech expert reveals the best mobile phones, apps and software for getting your bets on while out and about.
The inside line from Blue Square League tipster Skeeve on his 10 commandments for building your own betting niche.
A fresh look at the 2 racing tipster services – one focusing on the All Weather and the other Flat, which have made excellent strides since May 2010. Affordable & easy to follow – one of these has been welcomed into our Hall of Fame.

2. Mike’s Football Bets

Mike analyses the forthcoming football betting opportunities over the next week and highlights a few bets he feels offer value. This is part of a season-long experiment to see the likely returns from such an approach and to build up a public record.

Very close to a good weekend for the Main bets last Saturday and Sunday with the late Dimitar Berbatov goal, adjusting our profit in that game from a full 0.95 pts to just 0.475. We just needed one further goal in the Sunderland – Liverpool game to pick up a further 1.42 pts profit, which would have made a major difference to our ROI. Such fine margins at play, although of course, the belief is that evens out over the season. As it was just a 0.45 pt profit for the Main bets from 3 pts staked.

Ante-post wise though it was a good weekend with Stoke climbing back into the top ten for our bet on them at 7/2 and Blackpool conceding 2 more goals to ensure they still have the leakiest defence in the top flight (we are on at 11/8). It’s anyone’s guess who is going down now though although I am confident that at least 2 out of our 3 bets on Wolves, Wigan and West Brom to go down will pay out.

There are no bets this weekend as its International Football and so I am preparing for what should be a manic April, with plenty of games lined up in the English top flight!

Just to clarify, although we have members and some tipsters providing some free tips and systems, we are primarily a review service. Please dont expect miracles or read too much into this experiment!

3. A Sporting Chance

Scott Armstrong is The Sportsman who provides his regular expert betting advice on a range of sports such as Darts, Racing & Football. Each week via this column you can find his latest betting insight and expect some advice in fairly untapped markets – his speciality!

Godolphin appointed Mahmood Al Zarooni as their second trainer last season to aid Saeed Bin Suroor and the decision was rewarded with their most successful campaign in years. The Godolphin bandwagon had went off the rails in the previous years to 2010 from their original blue riband days when they first initiated the project. As a horse racing fan it’s hard to be overly critical of the operations as the Maktoums put so much financially into racing but as mentioned in previous columns, sentiment has no place in a successful bettor’s heart.

The Dubai based Godolphin horses return to Newmarket in early April and upon returning to UK shores they will have done very little fast work which puts them behind a lot of other yards in terms of fitness. One area where I think we can be profitable is by acting as layers to the Godolphin yard is in the early months of the flat season. Invariably the yard’s horses are over-bet as the Godolphin name is massive in racing terms and punters latch onto them. That being the case, how do the teams horses from the front end of the market bear up? The following figures are taken from the early part of the season, April to June with Godolphin horses priced at 9-4 or shorter. And it reveals some big losses.

2008: 4 wins from 18 races, -£838.00
2009: 3 wins from 21 races, – £1445.00
2010:- 16 wins from 52 races, -£1529.00

It certainly offers some food for thought and the brave punters among you could stand to make a fair pot of money taking on racing’s rich boys.

The A to Z of Tipster & System Reviews

Check out the new look Secret Betting Club website, which now features a full A to Z list of many of the tipsters we have reviewed and analysed.

Our latest reviews include: All By The Book, Bet Advisor, On The Nose, Northern Monkey, Green Sports Bets, Adys Lay of The Day, NFL Linebacker, Bet Devil, Packed Pockets, Bet Soft Pro & Bettor Logic.

There is also plenty written about Football Value, Signature Racing Tips, Simplebet, The Market Examiner, Herbie Fogg, Sportyy, Tipster 365, The Punter Club, Lee Bollingbroke & The Nagman

if you cant find a review on the service you are interested in, simply enter their name into the search the site box – chances are we have featured them in the past.

Visit here for more info: Secret Betting Club

4. The Winabobatoo Weekender

Winabobatoo provide English Premier League, Football League and Scottish Premier ratings and systems. Using their own in-house systems to often ‘Win a bob or two’ for their members, they are penning an exclusive Weekend Football Guide to help with your bets every Saturday and Sunday.

Please accept my apologies for me not being able to be with you last weekend.

One of the potential problem areas when betting is the shorter-priced matches: They look good as the better teams are often playing the lesser teams. What value do they really offer? When the better sides are playing away from home, their odds are quite often lower than 2.75.

Backing every away side priced Under 2.75 had made shown a severe level stakes loss this season but who are the Heroes and who are the Villains? I’ve written an article that will feature in the Winabobatoo Members’ Magazine on Monday and it shows which teams produce the goods when short-priced and which don’t. You can download a full copy of the article if you click the link to my website below.

Wycombe and Chesterfield both have strong credentials this weekend and the stats analysis shows that Wycombe have won three times out of four when priced Under 2.75 this season making a profit of +2.85 points, and Chesterfield have won 4 times out of 8 returning 9.81 points for a gain of +1.81 points. Chelsea, Liverpool, and Newport feature amongst the Villains and don’t produce the goods often enough to justify being supported when short-priced.

Tips: Chesterfield to win at Barnet – available with Blue Square at 2.10

Tips: Wycombe to win at Morecambe – available with Victor Chandler at 2.62

Winabobatoo membership is closed for the current season but if you like analysing the various aspects of football and statistics, have your own views that you can use alongside my ratings, then you might wish to consider joining us for the 2011-12 season.

Good luck with your betting.

Mike Lindley

Visit The Winabobatoo Website

5. Putting For Profit

Ian Richards runs Sportsbettingindex.com, a betting portal which includes an odds comparison site, free tips and betting blog – helping the punter for the last 10 years.

PGA – Shell Houston Open
Europe – Hassan Trophy
Champions – Mississippi Gulf
LPGA – Kraft Nabisco
Euro Challenge – Kenyan Open

With the appearance of the Shell Houston Open on the tournament schedule, it shows how close we are to the Masters at Augusta as it has been the forerunner to the first Major of the year for the last four years. What they have tried to do at Redstone is create a course with certain nuances the players will find at Augusta. Looking at the last four winners, it becomes very clear the young guard have been beating the old guard – you just have to look at the winners: Kim (25), Casey (32), Wagner (28) and Scott (27).

If you are looking for the ages of the players for any particular week the PGA tour compiles a useful file every week called “Inside the Field” and you can find this week’s here at http://www.pgatour.com/2011/tournaments/r009/03/19/inside_the_field/index.html
The guide is usually published on a Monday.

No sooner do we have an event on home soil in Europe when they disappear again, this time to Morocco. I am beginning to despair with this ‘European’ tour as there is no real continuity for players, let alone punters! Each week we keep turning up at new courses, in a climate very different to the week before with different food, different time zones and different fairways and greens. At the moment I feel like taking a back seat until the tour comes to Europe for the bigger events.

We have the first Major of the year on any tours with the Kraft Nabisco event on the LPGA. It has been a Major since 1983 and has been held at the Mission Hills course at Rancho Mirage California even before it was a Major. It is nice to have an event with so much stability next week and will take up a lot more of my time than the Hassan Trophy!!

Your 5 Free Gifts When Joining SBC

As soon as you join us here at the Secret Betting Club we will give you totally free, 5 fantastic betting methods and systems to help you make money betting including…

The 4 Pronged Attack Racing System. Totally free to follow, this method was one of the very best racing systems out there in 2010. You can now also get the system qualifiers sent via email free!
The ‘When Odds Are Odd’ Systems – 3 different systems that show you how to capitalise on bookmaker mistakes.
Our new Golf Betting Strategy, which in just 6 months has made a 74 pt profit from just 23 golf tournaments (a Return on Investment of over 57%!).

6. Testing The Fink Tank

Dan Jones from SBC has been testing out the free football Fink Tank ratings all season with promising results so far. Each week via this column he highlights the latest value bets according to the ratings.

Here are the latest value bets according to the latest Fink Tank Ratings. You can find some background on this test here.

Fink Tank provide predictions on football games based on their model which is roughly based around shot on target. The Fink Tank team found that shots on target was the best predictor of the outcome of a football game and when you rate this for various attributes you can have a reliable prediction model.

For our test, we use the predictions from Fink Tank and only bet when the predicted % chance is better than the predicted chance implied by the available bookmaker odds. The bigger the difference, the bigger the value on offer in theory.

No bets this week, but here’s an update on last week’s picks with results in the far right column.

There were a couple of cases where playing the double chance with the draw would have reaped a nice reward. Spurs v West Ham and West Brom v Arsenal were good examples of this.

It’s also interesting to see where the profits are coming from this season. In previous posts, I’ve outlined how it’s the bets with 10% value or higher which are bringing home the bacon. Along similar lines, backing all bets below 2.25 has lost -8.5 points, whereas backing at 2.25 or above only would so far have made 40 points with an ROI of 23%

For more tests of ratings services like this in sports from football to horse racing, check out how membership of Secret Betting Club could help you.

7. The Friday Freebie

Well I have just about recovered from those 4 days of Cheltenham madness. Madness in a good way I would hasten to add, looking forward to 2012 already!

Naturally it has taken a few days for the dust to settle, the offers to get back to what they were and for us to get back the bread and butter of making risk free profits day in, day out. So let’s break everyone back into the swing of things nice and gently with a straight forward instant risk free profit courtesy of BETCLIC

Here are the details of their unique sign up offer which you can take as a risk free punt or we can lock in some risk free profit very nicely on this one. The key is to underlay the bet on the exchange so that if the bet does win then whilst you won’t get the refund, you lose less at the exchange and have locked in a profit. Naturally if the bet loses you will win on the exchange and your free £20 stake returned by BETCLIC, you will lock-in a profit that way.

We have just added them onto ODDSMATCHER too so you can find your own bets.

For example……

Wales v England, Euro 2012 Qualifier, 26/03/11 – 3:00PM

BACK DRAW at BETCLIC with £20 at odds of 4.50

LAY DRAW at BETFAIR with £14.14 at odds of 5.00 (you will need £56.57 in Betfair to cover this bet)

If it is a draw then you will win £70 at BETCLIC and lose £56.57 at Betfair for an overall profit of £13.43. You won’t qualify for a refund but that doesn’t matter as you have locked in a guaranteed profit anyway.

If not then you will lose your £20 stake at BETCLIC but win £13.43 (after 5% commission) at Betfair, leaving you £6.57 down but your initial £20 will be refunded by BETCLIC again giving an overall profit of £13.43, brilliant!

Then you in the running for plenty more existing user offers and bonuses. And if you miss the bet above and would like another working out please drop us a line at info@bet72.com and we would be happy to help.

Also a quick word on BETDAQ too, their free £30 offer and 2.5% commission offer expires at the end of March so if you haven’t got an account yet, now is the time.

Full details on our site here – BETDAQ OFFER

Plus if you want to hear me, yes live, in the flesh, go on, you know you want to, then we are now hosting regular educational webinar sessions. These are proving to be a great success and we are also recording as many as we can and these are now released on the site too. If you want to check these out then goto…..

http://bet72.com/webinars/recordings/

That’s all from me, have a profitable weeked.

Darren Hall – www.bet72.com – No Risk. No Catch. Just Good Maths.

That’s all for today! Have a great weekend…

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