Tag Archives: money management
Betting Tips and Money Management in Soccer Betting
Soccer experts provide you with betting tips, the media publishes the latest news about the opponent teams and their key players, bookmakers support hundreds of betting methods
However, when you finally place your huge wager on a sure favorite, this is the time to start praying… Unfortunately, the world of soccer betting is quite unpredictable. There are thousands of factors playing against us. How can we cut our betting losses? The only way to do it is by using money management strategies.
This article summarizes the methods and strategies of betting money management and provides a statistical comparison of their performance based on betting odds and match results of top European leagues.
The most common betting money management strategies in our days are: Martingale, Row of numbers and Kelly criterion. While the first two do not require any prior information, Kelly criterion requires the punter to know the probability of a win.
DEFINITIONS
Before presenting the performance analysis, a brief description of the above-mentioned strategies is necessary:
— Martingale strategy means doubling the stack after a loss and returning back to the starting stack after a win. This strategy is the most popular today and promises positive profits, but requires intensive money investments.
— Row of numbers means planning a series of constant profits. Given betting odds, the punter calculates each stake in a way that will allow him to make the planned profit. In case he loses, he should increase the next stack in such a way the profit will return both the money already lost and the planned profits for the lost games. This strategy is less aggressive than Martingale but still dangerous.
— Kelly criterion: mathematically proven to be the best strategy in the long run. However, it requires knowing the probability of a win. The stacks are calculated in proportion of the size of your funds and according to the relation between the probability of a win and the betting odds. When probability and odds are high, a high stack will be placed and vice versa.
DATA AND METHODS
In order to evaluate the performance of each strategy, we analyzed the betting odds set by bookmakers for the top European leagues. Imagine that bookmakers are punters who place a stake on a favorite with minimal betting odds. One can easily estimate the probability of a win by dividing the average number of home/draw/away outcomes by the total number of games in a season.
The betting odds and results are taken from the four European top leagues playing in the 2008/2009 season: English Premier, French Ligue 1, German Bundesliga 1 and Spanish Primera Division.
SUMMARY
— The results show that Kelly criterion is the best money management strategy of the three with an average profit of +5% compared to +1% (Row) and +1.2% (Martingale).
— The most profitable was the French Ligue 1 with a betting profit of +22% (Kelly), +9% (Row) and +10% (Martingale).
— The least profitable was the English Premier League with a betting loses of -10% (Kelly) ), -9% (Row) and -8% (Martingale).
A Roulette System That Works (Page 1 of 2)
I saw a roulette system advertised on television one night. What a joke! It was nothing more than a money management system. It isn’t a bad idea to manage your bets and your bankroll when you gamble, but if that is all you are doing, you just slow your losses or rearrange them. After ten years working in a casino and running a roulette table, I can tell you that money management systems do not make you a profit in the long run.
There is a roulette system that works, however. It takes some careful planning and a fair amount of work. In fact, you may have to spend days or even weeks tediously “charting” roulette wheels, which means writing down the numbers that come up on each spin.
This work is boring, which explains why not many people are willing to use this system. That’s a good thing, by the way. Any system that is is too easy will be over-used, and so stopped by the casinos. For example, while working at a casino, I watched a man make $80,000 over a period of months using this simple system, and management didn’t seem to care. Laziness, I guess, or they were making enough money on the other players to lose a few thousand back to this man every month.
On the other hand, after I quit my job and came in to gamble, the wheels were repaired and re-calibrated to eliminate any bias. More than one regular winner apparently would have been too much for them. You can see why systems which are more difficult and therefore less-used can work for a longer time, and why you should keep a low profile and not tell others what you are doing.
A Better Roulette System
Here is the system: Write down the results of 5,000 spins. See if there are any numbers that came up more than 151 times. If so, start betting on that number every spin. If not, try another wheel. That’s pretty much the whole plan.
Here is why it works. Roulette wheels sometimes have biases, meaning a number or numbers come up more often that they should by chance. Sometimes a number is spun frequently enough to make money. If 18 is showing up one in 30 spins, for example, and you bet $10 on it each time, you get paid 35 to one when it hits, plus you keep your $10 bet.
You would win $350 once for every 30 spins, on average, and lose $290 on the other 29 $10-bets. This would result in a profit of $60 for every 30 spins, or about $80-per-hour on a “fast” table (40 spins per hour). It is boring betting the same number every time, and a good “average” doesn’t mean you won’t have nights where you lose hundreds of dollars. I saw that gentleman who won $80,000 lose $500 some nights, but he stuck with it and made his money.
It is important that the bias is great enough. This particular player would play number only if it was coming up 1-in-33 spins or more often (151 out of 5,000 spins). His best number on one wheel came up once in every 29 spins, making him as much as $100 per hour for his time, depending on the pace of the game each night (with a $10 bet each time).