12 February 2025

5 thoughts on “Successful Football Betting Using a Portfolio Strategy

  1. Hi Audiendi,

    A spread of risk is vital to the success of any betting portfolio.

    We’ve said it so many times throughout this blog that betting continually on low priced favourites only, without value on your side, is a road to ruin.

    Have a look at the 2016 Summer League Campaign free Excel workbook download. In the Inflection Points tab, you’ll see that it was a zero sum game betting on anything up to odds of 2.28 (even with value on our side), but it was the mixture of these favourites, plus draws and underdogs that created the handsome profits.

    Bookmakers make their money out of people who are scared of lower probability bets. This is the reason why most favourites are under-priced – purely because most bets are placed on these outcomes.

    Successful betting is all about a certain mindset. It calls for being methodical, mechanical and unemotional. Once you have these qualities you will actually prefer to bet on the bigger odds, because that is where the money is. The smaller odds just fill in the naturally larger gaps of the losing streaks in the smaller probability bets.

    As for the example in this article, the bets were prompted by nothing more than having some balance to the portfolio. Yes, there was value in every bet (at least 10%). Finally, there is no need to balance the risks by weighting stakes. In fact, you actually nullify the effect of a large portfolio of different probability bets if you begin to apportion different stakes to them.

    It is always better to flat stake everything, with a ratchet system in place to increase all stakes once bank targets are met. You should also protect the back door with a stop loss mechanism to reduce stakes uniformly should the bank drop to certain specified levels of your choosing.

    Hope this helps and thanks for the questions!

  2. Hey Soccerwidow,

    Terrific job. I notice that you had a very high probability of success with six of the bets (at least according to your calculations). I’m interested in getting into betting but I hope always to be quite conservative for fear of losing control. So the relatively conservative bets appeal to me.

    What worries me a bit is the two bets which your calculations suggested had 37% and 38% chances of success, respectively.

    May I ask what prompted these bets? Did you detect excessive amounts of value in them? And did you balance the risk by staking less than you would have staked on the bets with lower odds?

  3. I agree that a portfolio strategy is a very good way to bet.

    The best way to use a portfolio in betting imo is in ante post betting.

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