Sharp Betting: Sports Betting as a Permanent Source of Income

Fortune Favours the Educated:

There are only three guaranteed ways of making regular, long-term profits from betting:

1. Arbitrage
2. Trading
   (Both requiring large numbers of transactions for a steady drip-feed)
3. ‘Sharp’ or ‘Value’ Betting (Soccerwidow’s approach)

Sharp betting relies on fewer numbers of transactions but promises far higher rates of return as it is based on finding pricing errors in odds calculations using the principles of probability and value.

Anyone who bets purely on form and gut-feeling is a ‘punter’, likely to suffer more dramatic fluctuations in fortunes with no guarantee of long-term success.

By contrast, sharp bettors use statistical methods to make comparisons with market odds (which are, of course, also compiled from statistics). It’s just a question of whose pencil is ‘sharper’; ours, or that of the bookmaker or betting exchange?

Sharp betting is more relaxed than either arbitrage or trading, where usually speed is of the essence. The Sharp Betting approach enables you to take time and analyse events without having to make snap-judgments or commit large amounts of money to win relatively small amounts purely by hedging (which is effectively all that arbitrage and trading really are).

Also, it is a 90-minute system which means you do not need to waste time monitoring matches to trade out at any point; just place the bets and then go out for a nice walk in the countryside…

Image: Kristijan Zontar (Shutterstock)

The methods and analyses we use for our Soccerwidow selections are based on a knowledge of technical analysis for shares and securities evaluation as well as actuarial science (insurances), tools and instruments, which are transferable to football betting.

Indeed there are many professional techniques for identifying patterns and trends to be exploited for profit. For sports betting the aim is to recognise and determine ‘false’ odds in the market and/or find deviations where the true expected value of an outcome in question is over or under the value estimated by the market.

Soccerwidow’s blog and courses are devoted to Sharp Betting: a technical, mathematical-statistical and fundamental approach to match analysis. It is a clean prognosis of future outcomes for professionally selecting bets without any reliance on form, player injuries or suspensions, the weather, the referee or a cat, dog or chicken on the pitch.

Sharp Betting requires an immensely good understanding of odds calculation and markets, combined with mathematics, statistics and probabilities. It is betting with a system, but it is not system betting!

Sharp Betting Modus Operandi

• Not every bet will win (100% hit-rate is unrealistic) but the expected percentage of bets do win
• Losses are therefore expected and risks are spread via portfolio betting
• Betting on ‘value’ is the bettor’s answer to the bookmaker’s ‘overround’ and allows you to transact wagers on a level playing field
• Bets are only placed if a match has been analysed profoundly and the true odds calculated
• Betting is performed only when the odds hold mathematical value
• No bets are made if the expectancy values are incorrect or unclear
• Also, no betting if there are too many unknown factors (e.g. gaps in the statistics), which may affect the reliability of the results
• Emotions play no role whatsoever
• There is a money management plan (staking plan) in place
• All bets are ‘full game’ wagers with no trading out in-play

Methods and Techniques for Recognising VALUE Bets

There are many techniques and instruments which the sharp bettor can choose to suit his/her personal taste and capabilities.

Unfortunately, there is no blueprint in existence to cope with all possible eventualities and manufacture a fool-proof system. This is purely because betting options are extremely diverse (sometimes as many as 250+ separate betting options for a single football match), and the available (bookmaker) markets are extensive (500+ online bookmakers and exchanges, and growing), meaning the variables are innumerable.

In addition, sports-betting is rarely explored scientifically (unlike stock market trading) and there is little true literature on the topic (one of the reasons we decided to start this blog).

However, it is possible to use tools and instruments ‘borrowed’ from stock market trading and use them for fundamental and descriptive technical analysis of sports betting, meaning that past results can be interpreted and consequently, prognoses for the future can be derived with frightening accuracy.

Soccerwidow has published a comprehensive sharp betting course which teaches in detail how to calculate ‘zero’ odds (‘true’ odds) in order to recognise betting options with ‘value’ attached to them.