October brought month 79 in the “Making a Million Challenge.”
Results haven’t been great the last few months,
July – +£1062
August – +£48
September – -£1318
So I was hoping for strong month to turn things around, Let’s see if that happened.
Value Betting And Trading
This month I really put more focus and analysis on value betting. Last year this was a huge earner and the results haven’t been replicated this year.
Value betting comes in two forms, one is just picking off slowing moving odds with soft bookmakers and occasionally exchanges. The second way is reading market movement and preempting the big moves across the board. When all bookmakers move their odds one way.
Below is an example, I bet Cambodia at 1.99 and its closing odds were 1.59.
Beating the closing line is a great indicator of long term profit. By reading the market I can beat the closing line around roughly 65% of the time.
It terms of beating the closing line. This month went really well and I felt like I uncovered a few new angles. In terms of results, beating the closing line didn’t mean shit.
Overall a loss of -£801 was made from 328 bets.
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FTS Systems
October was a terrible month for the FTS systems that I run with a total loss of –£1459 being made after 104 bets.
Not a huge amount to say really, it was just a really bad month. didn’t matter if the system was lay the draw, back the draw, back home teams, unders/overs etc. Sometimes in this game you are going to lose and you can accept it or bitch about it (I will accept it in this section then bitch about it later)
Bets And Beers Telegram Group
Bets and Beers had a strong month in October.
I follow the lay the half time draw method and this performed really well in the last weekend. However given how rough this month was going I took the last weekend off betting. Also I had been capping my lays at odd of 3.5
Which is not something I would usually do however I felt I need to reassess things and wanted a break from results.
I made £60 in profit in October.
Everything Else
In October there were quite a few other strategies that I followed. These were very low volume so I will group them all together.
- Casino Offers
- Football Bet Data
- MMA Betting
- Football Trading Club
Football trading club was low volume due to the international break. My overall results being poor had me stop following the home value system and double chance. Long term the football trading club is very profitable but at the moment I want to focus on my own strategies to turn things around.
Hit a few profitable casino winners and MMA betting was profitable this to lessen some of the damage in other area’s
A profit of £326 was made from this section.
October 2023 Total
Bets and Beers – £60
Value Betting/Trading – -£801
FTS – -£1459
Other – £326
Total Made In October
-£1874
Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began
£181,011
Thoughts Going Forward
The curse of the new house continues, I thought it was cute when my wife suggested my record losing month was due to “feng shui” or “new spirits” in the house.
To follow up last months record losing month with an even bigger losing month in October though hit pretty hard. It stopped being funny and at times I was asking myself ” Am I f***** cursed, what is going on?”
Teams chucking away 2 goal leads, smashing the closing line and seeing my team get a red card after 10 minutes etc. It did seem endless and it is the most frustrating period of betting career. However I know that bad runs can happen, especially when you are mostly straight betting. Trading you can reduce variance but my approach is 95% value betting.
After spending around 90% of my bankroll to move house, I have been staking fairly aggressively with a smaller bankroll and been burnt. Historically losing months have been very rare and there has never been two in a row before. So in that sense I don’t think was a terrible idea.
I lean that these last couple of months are a “black swan” and that it is just a patch of really bad variance.
Changes
On the flip side though I also have to consider that it isn’t just bad variance and my approach needs adjusting.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
This is the tough thing about betting, you can do the right things and still end up losing. When it comes to my value betting/trading I could look at the closing line and assess whether it was good or bad. Following other services this can be a little trickier.
I decided towards the end of the month to tighten things up. Bets and Beers and the football trading club I will put on hold until the new year. Look at where my bankroll is and then likely follow them with small stakes.
FTS I have a dedicated bank, which I will continue with until the end of season.
My value betting I actually think has improved this month. This downswing made me look at what I was doing and where I can make improvements. Which I have done.
What I can also do to reduce variance is trade out some liability on some of the bigger markets. Which when the market goes in my favour basically creates a larger value bet and can lower variance. Given that I can beat the closing line more often then I don’t, this is a profitable strategy.
This was something that I did much more of last year and due to over confidence/laziness haven’t done as much this year. Now I don’t think this is the only reason for the big differences in profit, up until the end of March last year I still had some of the big soft bookmakers left. However it could definitely help smooth over these run months and future potential losing months.
Hopefully November and December can see a positive end to 2023 and I hope your betting in October went better then mine.
See you next month!
