Making a million from sports betting

2023 wasn’t the strongest year for me in betting terms. Although it was profitable with a total of £15,330 being made. It was the worst year since I started betting seriously.

In total over the last 6 months of the 2023 a small profit of £537 was made. It was the first time I have really ever felt like I was wasting my time. When I first started this, I used mostly matched betting and arbitrage which is easy money, without being arrogant (These strategies are an easy way to make money but obviously limitations etc put a stop to it.)

As time went on I started to add casino offers, value betting, followed tipsters and developed some of my own methods. I always expected more variance but I still continued to win pretty much every month. Up until last year when losing month which were previously very rare, became much more frequent.

So 2024 marked a nice fresh start. My hope was that this patch was just a run of tough variance and that winning months would become the norm again.

Let’s take a look at results from January and February to see if that happened.

Value Betting Results

Value betting went about as well as it could have to start the year.

These bets are taken mostly on the exchanges, with a couple of small bookmaker accounts I have left and occasionally in shops. (Although I am now barred from the local Betfred). This year I have been slightly more selective with value bets, trying to leave out the ones that I think are marginal. In previous years I have always been about hammering volume and taking any edges even if they are small.

In total there were 149 bets and a total profit of £3570 was made.

My staking is very simple I look to win around £150 per bet, adjusting the stake size for odds.

FTS Systems

FTS is a service that provides historical data and models to help you profit from the football betting markets. Currently I am running 10 systems using FTS which are mixture are strategies.

In total a profit of £237 has been made from the FTS systems this year. I won’t go into too much detail about systems as everyone that joins FTS will use a different approach. So my results/systems are not really applicable to what others may be doing.

Bets And Beers

Bets and Beers has had a rough start to 2024 and I had had couple of message s about it which I will address here. I follow the lay the draw part of the service and ay the half time draw.

The LTD draw service lost £580 (58 points) in Jan/Feb.

HTLTD lost £90 (9 points) to £10 stakes in Jan/Feb.

Not the best start for the service however to put it into perspective. Last year the LTD strategy won 218 points £2180 to £10 stakes and the HTLTD won 74 points (£740 to £10 stakes).

The long term LTD graph going back to 2021 is very solid and when your laying at average odds of 7.78 you have to expect the losing runs to be pretty rough. However your bank should be set up to sustain these periods.

Here is the long term results sheet for Bets and Beers

Will Bets and Beers be profitable in 2024? 

There is no guarantee, but nothing suggests to me that this isn’t just a tough period. I think often people join services after a good period and then are shocked when a drawdown happens. This is the reality of sports betting its not always sunshine and rainbows.

Horse Racing System

One of the bright points of last year was developing a horse racing system. This was working very well and making consistent profits.

However recently results have seen it fall off a cliff. Not really sure why, I tracked the odds I was backing at, in comparison to the Betfair SP. They are consistently higher.

The system is based on sound logic. So it all goes back to our old friend variance again. Overall the system is still in profit by about £400 however had previously been up to a high of £1200.

I run the system on small stakes £5 to £20 (depending on odds). Will give it another few months and decided whether to bin it or keep it.

A total of -£302 was lost on horse racing.

Casino Offers 

I have done five high risk casino offers this year. Doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of stuff to do anymore, but I do get a few decent reload offers from time to time.

Unfortunately I lost every single of these.

A loss of -£500 was made from casino offers.

MMA

Jan and Feb saw a loss of -£817 for mixed martial arts and some in-play bets. Not a huge amount of volume here and MMA stakes are £200 a point so not overly concerned. Last year was strong and I still think I have a good edge in the markets. 

The Value Collective

The Value Collective is a Telegram group where I send out selections based on value bets on the exchanges and mma/boxing selections. The focus is on the stronger selections which also have enough liquidity on the exchanges to share.

A total of 120 bets were sent out over Jan and Feb. A total profit of 4.19 points for 0% commission accounts was made and 2.54 points for 2% commission accounts.

Not amazing numbers, not a disaster either.

The service is aimed at people that can take a longer term view of their betting and aren’t effected by short terms variance.

You can read more about the service here.

Jan/Feb Totals

Value Betting/Trading – £3570

FTS – £237

Bets and Beers – -£670

Horse Racing – -£302

Casino Offers – -£500

MMA/Inplay – -£817

Total Made In Jan/Feb 2024

+£1520

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

+£185,182

Thoughts Going Forward

Would have been nice to come out of the gates with a big profit to start 2024 but happy to see at least a positive start. Still feels like a battle of attrition at the moment, build up some momentum and then get wiped out on a bad weekend. Slowly however there seems to be some progress and a big upswing can happen at any point.

 It only takes one or two really good months to make a year. In 2022 there was a two month period where £15k profit was made, which nearly equals last year’s total. Having spoken to sports bettors that have done much bettor then me and won 7 figures. Rough years can happen even to the best bettors (which I am not).

I have no plan on changing anything at the moment, will run things as they are until the end of the football season and then look at potentially changing things. 

Thanks for reading, see you next month.

Useful Links

Value Betting Guide

Matched Betting Guide

Value Collective

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!

May brings month 74 in the “Making A Million Challenge.”

It was pretty poor month overall with a very small profit of £216 being made. To mix things up a bit and keep it interesting.

I will break down my results for the whole of 2023 so far.

Value Betting And Trading

First off we have value betting.

Value betting is placing bets with the aim to beat the closing line. Previously this was done mostly with bookmakers however now it is mainly on exchanges.

Alongside the occasional shop bet.

Looking at the graph you can that approaching close to 900 bets this strategy wasn’t in profit. The next couple of hundred bets it had a sharp rise in profit and then has been a bit up and down for the rest of the year.

Last year this was the most profitable strategy but this year its underperformed slightly. I think its just a case of putting in as much volume as possible. There is no real reason for it underperforming other then variance.

This year a profit of £4215 has been made after 1527 bets.

Not Familiar With Matched Betting Or Value Betting ?

Read Our Guides Below

Matched Betting Guide

Value Betting Guide

MMA Betting

Moving on to mixed martial arts betting, which has been pretty decent this year so far.

After 37 bets a profit of £1396 has been made.

Not a lot to add really. Don’t put a huge amount of volume through the MMA market, tend to try to pick what I think are the best spots. 

Previously I had been sending out bets on Discord for free but haven’t the last couple of months. Mainly just due to not remembering and I don’t use Discord for anything myself, it’s just ben forgotten in the background for a while. Might set something up on telegram as I am pretty active there with other betting services.

Bets And Beers Telegram Group

Bets and Beers is a service that provides selection for lay the draw.

The service provides multiple approaches however I just use the lay the half time draw strategy. Staking £50 per selection, the first 70 selections were £20 stakes as I was still testing the service at this point.

Bets and Beers has run pretty well this year as you can see. Hitting £3500 profit for the year at one point before running in to a few losers in the last 150 bets or so.

A profit of £2890 has been made from 400 bets.

FTS Ultimate

For FTS I run 4 season long betting systems. These are set and forget systems which are placed pre match. All of the systems are run on Betfair.

Let’s break down the results for 2023.

System 1 (Lay Draw), Stakes – £50 lay bet,  Results = £901 (97 bets)

System 2 (Form based system) £50 to £100 lay bets, Results = – £1600  (185 bets)

System 3 (Poisson)  £120 back bets, Results = £1875 (92 bets)

System 4 (Underdog System) £10 to £30 back bets, Results = -£329 (27 bets)

Total – £847

Everything Else

There are a few other strategies I use that are lower volume so I will just group them together.

This is casino offers, in-play trading and free tipster bets that I might place. All of these get added to my overall daily total but I am not always meticulous in recording them down.

It accounts for a profit of £2418.

2023 Total (Up until June 2023)

FTS – £847

Bets and Beers – £2890

Value Betting/Trading – £4215

MMA Betting – £1396

Misc – £2669

Total Made In 2023 so far

£12,017

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£180,098

Thoughts Going Forward

At this stage last year profits were double what they are currently in 2023. Which is a little disappointing as we always want to see progression. However with betting sometimes it requires some patience.

Strategies are very similar to last year with a couple of additions. Staking roughly around the same amount of money, so I think the difference is largely down to variance. I ran extremely well in the first 5 months of 2022 whilst in 2023 there have been a few slim months.

The season for all the big leagues has ended now and its a good time to look at finding new edges for the coming season.

I have been dabbling with football bet data for a couple of weeks which looks interesting and is something I will use for next season. Football Trading Club is another service I have been following for a few month, results have been very good and they provide selections for the summer leagues.

Profiting from the horse racing markets is something I want to get back to doing. Now it is quiet with football I am going to test out a few tipsters/services and might even get back to trading it if I can find the time.

If anyone has any recommendations, pop them in the comments.

Thanks as always for reading!

April marks month 73 in the “Making a Million Challenge”.

It was a strong month overall, the major leagues start to get interesting as teams fights for championships/promotion/relegation. Which can see some big changes in odds movement week to week.

Let’s get on to the results for April 2023.

Value Betting And Trading

Value betting performed pretty well in March.

The month started very strongly getting close to a profit £3500 before a late month downswing took it under £2000. 

Not a huge amount to say other then it was a solid month. 

At this point a lot of my value betting is just repetitively looking for the same things in the market and making the bets. It is all aimed at beating the close line either through straight up value bets or pre-empting moves in the market.

After 343 bets a profit of £1862 was made.

Not Familiar With Matched Betting Or Value Betting ?

Read Our Guides Below

Matched Betting Guide

Value Betting Guide

MMA Betting

Having a bookmaker that will take my action on MMA has been a nice addition.

Akbet.bet is a newish bookmaker that’s looking to take sharp action. They also offer prop markets which is enabling me to get money down. Limits aren’t huge but it is nice just not to get closed or limited to pennies after a week or two of betting.

There were 9 bets for MMA in the month of April, a profit of £685 was made.

Casino Offers

Oddsmonkey have put more focus on exploiting casino offers recently. I decided to have a look at at what offers were available in the current market.

I only did 6 offers this month but ran very well and made a profit of £685.

Casino offers at one point were my biggest earner but in all honesty they can be very boring and some offers are quite time consuming.

Writing this in May I have been doing offers but cherry picking the ones that are high value and don’t take up too much time. Which for me is the best strategy.

Want to learn plus ev casino strategy read our guide here

FTS Ultimate

For FTS I run 4 season long betting systems. These are set and forget systems which are placed pre match. All of the systems are run on Betfair.

Let’s break down the results.

System 1 (Lay Draw), Stakes – £50 lay bet,  Results = £241 (22 bets)

System 2 (Form based system) £50 to £100 lay bets, Results = –£775  (49 bets)

System 3 (Poisson)  £120 back bets, Results = £876 (24 bets)

System (Underdog System) £10 to £30 back bets, Results = -£150 (8 bets)

Total – £192

Bets And Beers Telegram Group

Only playing the set and forget HTLTD system at the moment with bets and beers.

Along with a couple of the horse racing lays. I do however keep forgetting these as they are not as frequent.

At the end of the season will reassess the other systems he uses and look at setting up a bank for each.

Great results in April staking £50 per lay.

A profit of £1409 was made after 103 bets.

-£124 was made following the lay selections on horses.

In-play Betting And Trading

Decent month for in-play betting and trading. Hit a big winner at odds of 50 to win over £1k, which is a figure that I haven’t won very often from one bet.

Despite that one big winner the total profit for the month was lower then that figure. The 0-2 score line is one that I like to look at often. If the home team gets one back, the crowd get’s behind them and you usually see a late push for an equalizer.

A total of £742 was made from in-play betting and trading this month.

April Totals

FTS – £192

Bets and Beers – £1285

Value Betting/Trading – £1862

Casino Offers – £685

MMA Betting – £685

In-play Betting And Trading – £742

Total Made In April

+£5451

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£179,858

Thoughts Going Forward

April marked the best month of the year so far. It was an odd one with a big of profit coming in the first 9 days of the month. Then I have gradually lost money day by day for the following 3o days (writing this 10 days into May where I have continued to lose).

Goes to show how volatile results can be with value betting/trading. 

I am not doing anything different at all. The process is exactly the same however results have been vastly different. Think this is one of the key factors in winning long term, focus on the process and let the results play out over the long term.

Been doing this long enough now to know that results will turn again.

Still waiting to move house. Which means I won’t be changing much up betting wise or adding anything.

Should all be wrapped up within the next month which is decent timing as football winds down. Then can look at the bankroll and have a think about how to approach next season.

Hope you had a profitable April.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!

2023 rolls on and its month 72 of the “Making A Million Challenge.”

+£704 was made in January, +£2930 in February got the year rolling. 

Let’s get on to the results from March.

Value Betting And Trading

March brought the first month of the year where value betting made a decent profit.

From the graph you can see it was fairly volatile at times. Weekends are when most of the bets are active and Sat/Sun often define how the month ends up.

Despite a fairly swingy month in terms of results it ended in the positive.

A profit of £1845 was made after 329 bets.

Not Familiar With Matched Betting Or Value Betting ?

Read Our Guides Below

Matched Betting Guide

Value Betting Guide

MMA Betting

March was a good month for MMA with the long awaited return of Jon Jones and the big Usman vs Edwards rematch. Felt pretty confident that Cyril Gane would give Jones a decent test at heavyweight after a few years out.

So when Jones took Gane down with relative ease and submitted him inside a couple of minutes it was pretty embarrassing.

Overall a profit of £405 was made from MMA betting.

FTS Ultimate

For FTS I run 4 season long betting systems. These are set and forget systems which are placed pre match. All of the systems are run on Betfair.

Let’s break down the results.

System 1 (Lay Draw), Stakes – £50 lay bet,  Results = -£5 (18 bets)

System 2 (Form based system) £50 to £100 lay bets, Results = £565  (37 bets)

System 3 (Poisson)  £120 back bets, Results = £129 (17 bets)

System (Underdog System) £10 to £30 back bets, Results = -£180 (10 bets)

Total – £509

Bets And Beers Telegram Group

Bets and Beers followed up February’s stormer of a month with a solid one in March.

I follow the lay the half time draw method staking £50 per bet. Along with the horse racing bets where I risk £200 liability per bet.

The half time lay results made a profit of £347 this month.

Horse racing lays made -£84.

A total profit of £263 was made.

Profitable month for the service to build on the big profit made in Feb. Not much to add, good results from a solid service that’s one I will be following for a long time.

In-play Betting And Trading

Had a mixture my own In-play betting, Bets and Beers new in-play service and had a look at The Football Trading Club in March.

In the future I will probably to start recording these all separately as the amount of volume that I’m betting in-play has increased by quite a lot.

It was a losing month for me in this area, despite a profitable month recorded for Bets and Beers live. This was due to missed bets and staking on some of my positions being bigger.

A loss of -£457 was made from in-play betting trading this month.

March Totals

FTS – £509

Bets and Beers – £263

Value Betting/Trading – £1845

MMA Betting – £405

In-play Betting And Trading – -£457

Total Made In March

+£2565

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£174,407

Thoughts Going Forward

Still waiting for our house move to go through at the moment. Which means I am holding back on increasing stakes until its done and dusted. In case any additional costs arise which is probably likely when solicitors are involved.

Overall though this year has started pretty well. It’s looking like last year I probably ran above expectation and results this year seem to be more in line with previous years.

Not looking to change much up at the moment. Once the house deal is done, my intention is to scale up my stakes and bet more aggressively. The last few years of betting/trading profit have been going towards the house move. Wary that a downswing or bad year could put me a year or two back from buying a new house meant staking very safely.

However with this looking to be done soon, pushing on towards that £1,000,000 target could become more interesting.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!

December capped off month 70 in the “Making A Million Challenge.”

It was a frustrating month at times and after the first 20 days of 2023 I was in a -£2000 hole. In the long term results over a 20 day period don’t really mean much.

However I did feel an expectancy to start the year well. The betting gods clearly though don’t give a fuck about how you feel the year should start and hey why should they!

So I sucked it up and just kept doing what I normally do. Which normally produces a profit at the end of the month.

Let’s dig into results for January.

Value Betting And Trading

Read the markets pretty well this move in terms of getting value against the closing odds. Consistently getting closing line value which in turn should equal a profit. However it doesn’t guarantee it.

Closing line value is the odds a bettor gets relative to the closing odds. If they beat the market closing odds, they got positive CLV. If the market beat them, they got negative CLV. Beating the market means getting a better odds than the closing odds at sharp bookmakers.

January ended up being a losing month.

After 319 bets a loss of -£1411 was made.

Not Familiar With Matched Betting Or Value Betting ?

Read Our Guides Below

Matched Betting Guide

Value Betting Guide

MMA Betting

I made one solitary bet on MMA in January, which was Gilbert Burns to win inside the distance.

The reason for the low number of MMA bets was a lack of UFC cards and the poor quality of the cards. Probably due to not being able to get downs bets until a day or two before events start (no soft bookmakers) and the time it can take to watch tape on lesser known fighters. I just didn’t have much inclination to delve deep into the last few cards.

This weekend however is a huge card with decent money already available on Betfair so this will pick up.

A profit of £220 was made betting on MMA.

FTS Ultimate

Slight change this month to FTS as I started using the poisson database to place bets.

This added one more system but also meant at times it conflicted with an under 2.5/3.5 goals system that I had been using.

I made the decision to drop the goal system and follow the poisson due to the results I have had. One system has been very profitable whilst the other has just consistently lost this season. This may be a bit short sighted but I feel less conflicted about selections and can reassess at the end of the season.

Let’s break down the results.

System 1 (Lay Draw), Stakes – £50 lay bet,  Results = £572

System 2 (Form based system) £50 to £100 lay bets, Results = -£208

System 3 (Poisson)  £120 back bets, Results = £806

System (Underdog System) £10 to £30 back bets, Results = -£100

Unders system (No longer using) – £22

Total – £1092

Bets And Beers Telegram Group

Rough month for Bets and Beers and had a few messages about it after I highlighted as a service that I use last month.

All I can say on the matter is that all services/methods/strategies have losing periods. If you are going to try and make money doing this its something you have to accept. If you choose to follow a service then make sure you understand that. 

historical results

Look at the historical results, its plain to see that there has been losing months but long term the service has been solid. Does that guarantee it will win in the future? no nothing is guaranteed.

However accept that you made the decision to follow the service, you decided the stakes. Nobody forced you into anything and ultimately take responsibility for own betting.

Missed quite a few bets this month for the horses and also for the in-play lay the draw when its a triggered at half time.

Decided to adapt my approach going forward and increase stakes but only play one strategy. The strategy I will follow is laying the half time draw, stakes will go up from £20 to £50 per bet.

My reasons for this are that although all strategies have shown to be profitable, I like laying at lower liabilities. Whilst the straight up LTD from kick off can be fairly high odds. Again this is just my personal preference if you follow the service do what suits you. I will also leave the in-play lay the draws alone just because I know that I can’t follow them all.

A loss of -£141 was made from this service.

In-play Betting And Trading

Decent but not spectacular month for in-play betting and trading. One of the better trades I had this month was laying Gillingham when they managed to go 3-1 up against Swindon.

Thankfully Charlie Austin came to the rescue and bagged a few goals to seal the comeback.

Overall a profit of £944 was made from in-play betting and trading.

Jan Totals

FTS – £1092

Bets and Beers – -£141

Value Betting/Trading – -£1411

MMA Betting – £220

In-play Betting And Trading – £944

Daily P/L

Total Made In January

+£704

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£169,012

Thoughts Going Forward

Not the best start to the year but not terrible either. 

I know that the way I approach betting works and that it just requires some patience to see the results sometimes. In terms of new strategies or services that I am looking at. Been looking into some horse racing services again as I do like the day to day nature of horse but I also don’t want to spend all day in front of the computer (horse racing trading).

Exponential bet looks interesting, this an automated horse racing service. If anyone has any feedback I would welcome it. 

Another service I have been testing the waters with is Systematic betting. The main issue that most horse racing tipsters have is matching the quoted odds especially when using Betting exchanges but have had success with small stakes so far.

Thanks for reading hope you had a profitable Jan!

December marked month 69 in the “Making A Million Challenge” and we also saw the end of 2022.

Although the world seems to be in a constant state of chaos with inflation, war, climate change etc. After the lockdowns and previous years it did seem a bit more normal.

Still enjoying the betting and trading on a daily basis, overall it was a very positive year!

In today’s post I will quickly go through Decembers results, then take a look at the strategies/results used for 2022.

December Results

Alright let’s quickly go through the results for December.

December was an odd month. It started off very well and I continued to make good trading decisions in the world cup and value bets were winning. Then in the knockout stages things seemed to go pear shaped, everything just started losing and some bias crept into my in-play trading as the bigger named teams squared off.

By Christmas it looked like I would probably have a small losing or winning month depending on the next few days. However the return of “regular” football saw a big increase volume and the last few days of the month exploded in profit.

Which meant that December finished with a decent profit totaling £3632

2022 Review 

Let’s take a look at the year as a whole, breaking down which strategies/services performed well.

2022 was a record year in terms of profit with a total of £39,845 being made. Which was a great total and by March I had run through all pretty much all my bookmaker accounts and focused on using purely the exchanges and betting shops.

One perhaps concern was that the majority of the profit was made in the first 6 months with £27,475 being made at the end of June. The latter 6 months produced a profit of £12,370 which was more in line with previous years.

Obviously one factor was no more soft bookmaker accounts and of course there is always variance with betting/trading. Last year might be just end up being an outlier, guess I’ll find out.

Let’s dig into the results!

Horse Racing Betting

Disappointing year for the horse racing portfolio and by December I had knocked it on the head. Due to the fact that it didn’t seem to be warranting the time spent on it.

The year started fairly well and Beth Bet ( A horse racing value betting tool) continued to do very well and was bringing in the majority of the profit. Unfortunately early in the year (Sometime in Feb/March I think?) they discontinued the service without any reason.

It’s likely they were bought out by either a bookmaker or a syndicate. They seemed to be growing in their customer base and pretty much everyone I spoke to was having success with it.

After that I used some free tipsters from the Smart Betting Club, tried out Hansbury Racing and did some of my own betting. However results just went south for pretty much the entire second half of the year.

I’m not completely throwing horse racing betting away and might revamp things for 2023. However other strategies were proving to be much more profitable, meaning it was better to put more time into those.

Total made – £550

FTS Ultimate

FTS Ultimate is a service that gives you access to historical data and a few different models to use. It isn’t a service that provides selections, the service allows you to dig into the data to find your own edge.

I joined Ultimate for the 2022/2023 season, setting up four different systems that will be followed for the entire season. Exact details of the systems can’t be given out as it wouldn’t be fair to FTS however I can give brief labels to what they are.

System 1 (Lay Draw), Stakes – £50 lay bet,  Results = £2608

System 2 (Form based system) £50 to £100 lay bets, Results = -£335

System 3 (Backing under 2.5/under.3.5) £50 to £100 back bets, Results = -£1200

System (Underdog System) £10 to £30 back bets, Results = £162

Total – £1235

Bets And Beers Telegram Group

A service that I used for the last 2 months of the years was “Bets And Beers.”

Which I know sounds like the muggiest group ever or maybe even the start of a shitty rap song “Give me bets, beers, boobies and bitches, stacking cash backing players on pitches!”

I wonder what Vanilla Ice is up to, maybe we could team up…….

However the service itself though is very solid and has a few years of results backing it up. It’s a very simple laying service, where you lay the draw or lay horses.

I started the service on the 3/11/22 and by the end of the year a profit of £924 had been made.

This was staking £20 on the half time lay selections, then laying £50 in second half should that bet lose. For the horse racing selections I was risking £200 per bet.

If you are interested in the service you can find it here, along with long term results.

Bets And Beers Twitter

Value Betting And Trading

The next section is a couple of strategies that I record on one spreadsheet as it saves me a lot of time. However I will break down the strategies involved.

In 2022 this is what brought in the biggest amount of profit and where I found the largest edge.

That’s a pretty nice graph and although there are some £1-2k downswings. The amount of volume and lack of volatility makes it look like it was plain sailing. Although it never really felt like that on a week to week basis.

The strategies used were pre match trading, value betting and what I would say is advanced value betting or what I have heard be called “The top down approach.”

Pre Match Trading

Pre match trading is something that’s been covered a lot on this blog and I’ve also made videos about it. 

Your aim with pre match trading is to be in and out of the market before the start of the event, backing at a higher price then you lay or vice versa.

Here is a video which explains what pre match trading is with examples.

Value Betting and Top Down Approach

Value betting again is something else that been written about a lot on this blog. The aim is to beat the closing odds at Pinnacle or on the betting exchanges. This has been shown long term to be very profitable with very big sample sizes of data showing this.

Here is our guide to value betting if you want to learn more.

Due to running out of soft bookmakers the opportunity to do standard value betting was pretty limited this year. After listening to many successful American bettors talk about using a “top down approach.”

Which is reading odds movement and basically predicting where the market is going to move. Basically making a prediction on what the value side is likely to be.

I started to try and figure out if this approach would work for myself.

For example tonight Arsenal are playing Newcastle and looking at the market a few days earlier, there were signs that Arsenal would get backed in. I placed a bet at 1.87 and its currently moved in to lay at 1.82. (An indication of value, lay odds being lower then back odds.)

With value betting although I tend be right more then more then I am wrong. I stake smaller and leave it as a value bet (leave it to go in-play) as opposed to pre match trading. For pre match trading I am usually more confident in my read so stakes used are higher.

Also there are some smaller markets where you can’t get too much money down, which makes pre match trading difficult.

Hybrid Approach 

The third strategy is a hybrid of the first two. If my confidence level is fairly high I will stake a higher amount and then as the market moves in my favour reduce the liability. This is done by laying at a lower amount and leaving 20 – 30% of my stake as an enhanced value bet.

In the above example the lay bet is now at effective odds of 2.25. Crystal Palace are priced at 3.8 to lay. So by reading the market, laying then backing its enhanced what was already a value bet but lowered the stake.

The reason for this approach is that it lowers the volatility of straight value betting. Which means that you don’t have to deal with as much variance. 

How To Read A Market

How do you read a market?

That’s probably the biggest question and unfortunately if I gave out every detail it would either kill my edge or greatly reduce it. Which means I can’t give everything away however I can give some helpful advice.

First off you want some odds comparison software, value betting or arbitrage software. This enable you see odds movement in the market. (In real time)

Personally I use Oddsmonkey, Trademate and Oddsportal (comparison site).

This allows you to see what’s getting backed in with bookmakers, exchanges and sharp bookmakers. Then your basically looking for recurring patterns in the markets. There are some teams that I call “Market favs” you see them time and time again getting backed in.

Perhaps it’s 3 days out and you see money coming in on Sheff Utd for the 3rd week running. It’s fairly likely that the money is going to keep coming.

Next up you need to think about the market in different time frames

What happens 5/3/2 days before a game is due to start?

If there isn’t Pinnacle odds, which is the sharpest bookmaker?

When a team wins 5-0 what happens to the price in their next game immediately after the current games finished. 3 days before the game, morning of the game?

You will see overreactions in market where odds move too far, looking at time frames you might start to get a hint on when the market reverses.

It’s more advanced then straight up value betting, requires more work. However that’s likely why its more profitable. (Unless your a big multi accounter that can hammer through soft books without worry)

Overall from value betting and trading a total of £33,942 was made.

MMA Betting

Booked in my first losing year of mixed martial arts and boxing betting. The MMA markets have definitely become sharper over the last few years.

Whether it was just variance or I need to change my approach time will tell. 

95% of bets are on underdogs and a sample of 107 bets isn’t massive. However it did suck out a lot of the enjoyment that I get from watching MMA seeing bet after bet lose.

This is the nature of betting though and downswings can happen. We all know this we just don’t it to happen to us, 2023 should provide some answers on if things need to change or not.

A total of -£1314 was lost betting MMA.

2022 Totals

Horse Racing – £550

FTS – £1235

Bets and Beers – £924

Value Betting/Trading – £33,942

MMA Betting – -£1314

Misc/Everything Else – £4508

(Misc/everything else accounts for in-play betting on UFC, in-play football trading, casino offers and some free tipster bets. Whilst I account for these in my daily profit and loss sheet, I don’t track them on separate sheets as there isn’t a massive amount of volume. Overall it cuts down on the amount data input I do on a daily basis)

Total Made In December

+£3632

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£168,308

Thoughts Going Forward

Very happy with the overall results for 2022.

In terms of goals it would be good to push towards £50,000 profit in a year. However I could have just run very well in 2022 and profits could drop off. Have to be realistic and keep that in mind.

The UK betting scene does seem a complete fucking mess at the moment, which is a slight worry but completely out of our control. What we can control is to keep learning, finding edges, putting in the time and hopefully the profit continues to come.

Thanks for reading, hope you had a good 2022 and wish you all the best for 2023!

September was an interesting month.

Enjoyed football being back in full flow until the dreaded international break. There were some exciting UFC events to bet on and I spent much more time looking at live betting/trading football.

Let’s take a look at how things went in Month 66 of the challenge!

Value Betting/Trading

Not a great month for value betting which hit a pretty bad losing streak pretty early on. Didn’t find any really big pre match trading opportunities either to counter the down swing.

The international break also meant a reduction in the amount of bets compared to last month.

In total there were 176 bets made in September.

A total loss of -£1197 was made.

Overall a disappointing month for value betting and pre match trading. However long term the strategy is solid, I know it works just got to continue to put the work in.

Not Familiar With Matched Betting Or Value Betting ?

Read Our Guides Below

Matched Betting Guide

Value Betting Guide

Advantage Play – Casino Offers

Been a while but finally hit a decent win on a casino offer.

Betfair had been running a bet £25 get £5 bonus promotion for a few weeks, which was plus ev. Managed to hit a bonus round whilst staking £5 and won £651.

Overall I took part in 13 casino offers during September.

A profit of £697 was made in total.

Click Here To Read Our Guide To Making Money From Casino Offers

Smart Sports Betting Community/MMA Results

Booked in a losing month for MMA betting.

One bet that I was really confident in was Jake Collier to win inside the distance. This looked like it was going to cash in the few minutes as Collier put a beating on Barnett for most of the opening round.

However props to Barnett, he was incredibly tough and came out to finish Collier in the 2nd.

Overall I made 6 MMA bets this month and a loss of -£392 was made.

Horse Racing Tipsters

Down to following one horse racing tipster at the moment. That horse racing tipster is Kieran Ward’s Value Tips (free SBC tipster.)

Occasionally I also have my own horse racing selections which are based on market movement.

From the start of September horse racing bets were in the red. This continued throughout the month and there were many days where no selections were placed.

Overall a loss of -£227 was made from horse racing.

FTS Systems

FTS is a subscription service that offers a wide range of data to help you develop profitable betting strategies.

Currently I am running 3 season long strategies. One strategy focuses on laying the draw, the second strategy is goals based backing unders. The third strategy is again a lay strategy on the match odds markets.

During September these three strategies combined made a profit of £699.

In-Play Betting (Football and UFC) And Misc Bets

Last month I started looking a lot more at the in-play betting markets for football. This is something I have looked at previously but this month I approached it slightly differently .

The video below outlines an in-play trading session on football, discussing some of the strategies used.

Alongside the in-play betting, I also follow selections from a few podcasts and articles.

The football guys at Matchbook Insights are worth a listen with Mark O’Haire in particular being pretty sharp.

A total of £1553 was made from in-play betting and misc bets.

Results For September

Value Betting – –£1197

Casino Offers – £697

MMA – –£392

Horse Racing Tipsters – –£227

FTS Income – £699

In-Play Betting/Trading And Misc – £1553

Total Made In September

£1133

Overall Profit Since The Challenge Began

£162,252