Month 76 and 77 have passed in the making a million challenge.
My intention was to put out up post last month but with summer holidays, kids, work etc. I simply forgot.
July was a fairly quiet month with only the summer leagues and the womens world cup to bet on. Which meant that it was a pretty low volume month.
Overall a profit of £962 was made.
August saw the return of a big leagues and an expectation on my part to finish the year strong.
Let’s dig into it!
Value Betting And Trading
It was a strong month for value betting and nice to have the return of the bigger football leagues. Which provides more opportunity. The lower English leagues tend to be good sources and the advantage of being able to get down at local Betfred shops is also a positive.
Overall a profit of £2503 was made after 270 selections.
If you want learn more about value betting I recently put up a video going through how to get started!
MMA Betting
Bit of a nothing month when it came to mixed martial arts.
In previous updates I could fit in every single bet to show you from Bettin.gs but since the update I can only give you a snap shot.
After 13 bets a profit of £169 was made.
On a side note the updated bettin.gs is excellent and if you are looking for a free way to track your bet, I recommend it.
Bets And Beers Telegram Group
Bets and Beers has been one of the most consistent services that I have ever followed. Very few losing months and and my graph pretty much only moved one way.
Until this month.
August also saw the addition of selections in the first half goal market. Which I decided to follow by placing a bet at odds of 1.5 and looking to get it matched in-play. This basically doubled my liability on each game.
It proved to be a bad timing to double my stakes.
A loss of -£1550 was made after 140 bets.
Despite a bad run I won’t be changing anything. Historically results are strong, drawdowns have happened in the past and following the system long term has made money.
FTS Systems
August saw the return of the major football leagues which also meant the return of FTS.
This season I am running 10 systems.
After a successful 2022-203 season, I wanted to increase the amount of volume as my stakes are roughly the same as last year. Having recently bought a house, I’m not in the position to increase stakes so volume is the other way to look at increasing profits.
A profit of £407 was made.
My Trading/Betting
My personal trading/betting was something of a car crash this month.
Not a lot of volume but lost fairly consistently this month. I do like to take on an away team that’s leading by 2 goals and it just didn’t come off this month. Most of the damage came backing Gent when they were 11 against 10 versus Servette at home. Even though the odds were short, I thought they offered value.
They ended up blowing a lead and getting eliminated in extra time.
A total of -£550 was lost from 21 trades.
Everything Else
So there is quite a bit more that I followed in August. Which in future I will start to separate, however being slightly short of time I will put them together as they tend to be much lower volume then everything else.
- Football Trading Club
- Casino Offers
- Football Bet Data
- Free tips (Matchbook, Asian Connect etc)
Football trading club is a service I have been tracking for a while and started to back their home value selections in August alongside a few of their in-play alerts. Only managed 2 casino offers in August which both lost.
I run one system on football bet data which threw up a couple of losing selections. Selections will increase for this system as the season goes on and more data is collected. Judging by my end of month total the selections that I followed from free tipsters also lost this month.
A total of -£931 was made from this section.
August 2023 Total
Bets and Beers – -£1550
Value Betting/Trading – £2503
MMA Betting – £169
My Trading/Betting Football – –£550
Misc – -£931
Total – £48
Total Made In July and August
£1110
Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began
£184,203
Thoughts Going Forward
Got to admit that I found August really frustrating.
After making just under £40k profit last year, there was an expectancy on my part to hit a similar figure this year. Which just hasn’t happened.
Despite maintaining similar stakes and using the same strategies the results just haven’t been as good. I do think that last year I ran on the positive side of variance and perhaps this year is balancing things out. August started really strong with £2500 profit made in the first 10 days and then to see a final figure of £48 did piss me off.
At the end of the day though bitching and whining doesn’t help. Sometimes it just requires some patience, as long as your approach is good.
There are things I can improve.
Following the likes of matchbook insights and Asian Connect tipster for example without tracking them properly is silly on my part. The analysis always seems very good but I probably should not be staking them the same as I do with proven strategies.
Ultimately there a lot of things I should be grateful for. Having good health, decent relationships with family/friends, security, a house over my head. Feeling pissed off about not winning enough money from sports betting seems petty and kind of dickish.
So apologies for being petty and kind of a dick in this blog post.
Anyway thanks for reading, hope your betting/trading is going well, will be back next month!
Variance rears its dark and ugly head….But not for much longer, you’ll be back with a vengeance..!
Cheers Thomas
Your portfolio is still sound enough to keep you in profit even on a brutally poor month by your standards Ryan, only two of your five turned a profit and yet you still made some money, we look forward to better times ahead!
Cheers Andy