2024 started positively, but it has been a while since I strung a few strong months of profit together.
March marked the 84th consecutive month of betting for myself, let’s dig straight into the results.
Value Betting Results
The value betting strategy continued a strong start to produce some decent profits in March. In terms of staking I keep it simple and look to win £150 per bet, adjusting the stake for the odds. The only times I deviate from this is when I think there is a lot of value in a selection and then I increase my bet to win slightly more.
Most on my value betting is done on the exchanges and a couple small bookmakers I have left. Value betting on the exchanges is different from soft bookmakers in that I try to preempt market moves, by reading the market. This doesn’t work all the time but works enough to be profitable.
On soft bookmakers its simple a case of finding odds higher then exchange/Pinnacle.
Overall there were 214 bets and a profit of £1919 was made.
Interested in Value Betting? Click Here For My Best Value Betting Software List
FTS Systems
I stopped running my FTS systems in March, I did intend to see it out till the end of the season. However I really wanted to cut down on the amount of time I spend betting.
Many reading this will be familiar with the Pareto principle, where 80% of your results comes from 20% of your work.
I have felt for a while now that the most profitable strategies I use are those of that I have developed. Over the years I have tried a lot of tipsters/services etc and found them to be profitable, to a smaller extent. In terms of the contribution to overall profits.
Personally I feel that time would have been better focused on staking more on my own strategies and improving them. This is no knock on FTS, over the two years I have used it, it has been profitable even after accounting for fees.
Overall in the two years a profit of £1346 was made from FTS. Subscription for it has cost £998 in total. Including subscriptions £348 was made.
However with UK betting industry being what is it at the moment. Putting energy into things outside betting and focusing only on my strongest strategies has meant FTS has been put to the side for the foreseeable future.
Bets And Beers
Bets and Beers needed to rebound after a tough start to 2024 and a profitable month in March was had.
The LTD service made 24 points in March and the LTHTD (Lay the half time draw) lost -4.7 points.
Overall following the service to £10 stakes made £193.
Similar to FTS this will be the last month I will be following Bets and Beers. Again it is no knock on the service, in fact B&B is really easy to follow and historically very profitable. It’s a decision made on lowering the amount of time I spend on betting.
Horse Racing System
On to the horse racing system which has a had a rough start to 2024. This is a system I use on the betting exchanges mostly but when possible also back with bookmakers. Surprisingly Copybet have been pretty happy to let me bet smaller stakes for about 6 months now.
Props to them for that, don’t know how others have found them?
It requires me to be at the computer at certain hours of the day, so there are several days this month where I wasn’t able to bet
Overall the system lost -£19 this month and had been on a disappointing run. Writing this 7 days into April it is now showing signs of its early promise. Having rebounded from a heavy losing period.
This is how the system looks overall (Including early April results) staking £10- £20 per selection, it beats the Betfair SP consistently. Volume is high with multiple bets most days. Hopefully it can go on a decent run in the next few months
The Value Collective
The Value Collective is a Telegram group where I send out selections based on value bets available on the exchanges and mma/boxing selections. The focus is on the stronger selections which also have enough liquidity on the exchanges to share.
If you are able to use 0% commission accounts a profit of 9.2 points would have been made. 2% commission accounts would have made 8.6 points.
A pretty decent month overall from these selections, my profit to £150 a point is around £1350. I say around because I use both 0% and 2% accounts depending on the bet.
Overall the service is in profit by 23 points to a 2% commission account since it started.
You can read more about the service here.
March Totals
Value Betting/Trading – £1919
Bets and Beers – £193
Horse Racing – -£19
Value Collective- £1350
Casino/Misc – £177
Total Made In March 2024
Total = +£3620
Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began
+£188,802
Thoughts Going Forward
Strong month of results and I enjoyed the extra time away from betting. I still enjoy sports betting and its had a profound positive effect on my life. It’s taught me a lot about variance, patience and the ability to try and analyze situations better. A lot of those skills are transferable and can be applied to fitness, business etc.
If you can gamify different aspects of your life it makes it much easier. For me, making sports betting simply a game of beating the closing odds made it much easier. Other aspects of life are the same if you build your understanding of the rules.
Dropping services/tipsters outside my own strategies could make this blog a lot less appealing. As I don’t give away exactly what I do with my own strategies and it isn’t replicable by just reading this blog. Where as something like bets and beers was entirely replicable.
This is the 84th month of consecutive betting, pretty much on a daily basis. Perhaps it is just a little bit of burn out on my part. However come September I may feel different and start adding services/tipsters back in.
Hope you had a profitable March, will be back at the end of April with results.
If you are betting manually I think you are doing the right thing. Following multiple tipsters and having to put them all on manually is a huge time suck, and then you are just betting on faith. Much better to spend that time researching your own systems, then if results are not so great you have the power to spend more time tweaking them.
I am working purely on automated systems so can test out tipsters (that are feasible to automate at least) with a small bit of up front work setting up bots, then I let them go at smaller stakes and if they prove profitable can up stakes and if not I can drop them. I haven’t really found much that works consistently and long term though. Obviously variance does play a part but like you, I am now thinking it’s time to Pareto it and just focus on the 2-3 things I’ve found which do work, up the stakes, and drop the rest of the dross.
As an aside, you did well to make money on your last month of Bets n beers. Been following it since just before xmas and it’s had an absolute mare for me (I know you don’t follow all of them which may have helped). It has also continued to crash and burn in April so far, so good decision to drop it! I will be automating it and putting on minimal stakes to see if it has a turnaround for me but my heart is telling me not to even bother with the effort of that. 🙂
Good luck for next month, I will stick around to read regardless of what systems you do or don’t follow.
Cheers Andy for the comment.
Automation is always something that ahs interested but never got round to implementing it.
I think Bets and Beers is just on a rough run of variance at the moment. Historical results are very strong at with higher odds liabilities on laying the draw, drawdowns can be quite brutal.
Hope your betting and progress towards FIRE is going well.