Live Football Betting Tips
Any betting requires you to predict an outcome. Therefore, football betting requires you to be a kind of fortune teller. However, you should not be making guesses based on your inner instinct. Although your gut has some value in gambling, it is your brain that should be exercised the most. Educating yourself on the teams and the managers is expected when you are betting on a result or an accumulator. You would carefully assess everything you know to come to a decision on the likely outcome.
Live football betting, or in-play betting, should be no different. Before we offer any potential system or strategy, our first tip is to keep calm. In-play markets come and go rapidly. A tenner here or there on yellow cards, number of corners, next scorer, and you could quickly be a hundred quid down. Therefore, you need to keep calm and make strategic choices, even when your team is one up in the play-off final, and your fingers are itchy to enjoy some of the glory too.
Live betting allows you to spread the risk
We began with a hint of caution, but we should also point out that we think live football betting improves your chances of making accurate predictions, and so making money. First, the number of bets on offer across sports books makes it easier to find value. Remember, you are looking for the stakes that seem to be in your favour, where the bookie might have misjudged the factors. With multiple, fast-paced markets open during the match, these opportunities for value are increased.
You are also more knowledgeable of the variables when watching a live match. Before a fixture kicks off, you have limited information about systems and chosen players. You are working from the historical record of the teams or their form. However, when the whistle blows you know a) the players selected b) the system chosen c) the strategic approach (counterattack, park the bus, full-on attack) of the manager, and d) which players have shown up that day. Suddenly, with this increased information, your intellect can kick in, and you can use genuine skill to make money.
However, the route to making the most of this knowledge is to spread the risk. Your aim is to turn a profit by the end of the 90 minutes. So, like with any betting, if you are given odds of 4 – 1, then you only need to win once every four times to break even. Therefore, you should be prepared to lose to win in the end. In-play betting on multiple markets allows you to create this effective spread of the risk to come out on top in the end.
Making sound judgements
This may be one of the “duh, yeah” tips – but it is worth saying. When in-play betting, watch the match. Your advantage for live play betting is your increased knowledge and therefore your heightened predictive skills. Bet on markets for games that you are not watching, and you might as well be throwing the craps dice.
When watching, look for the individual performances that are going to offer the most predictable outcomes. Add into this the decisions made by the coach. For instance, if your team’s star striker has been asked to play from the middle of the park, to run the channels and pick up long balls from the wing, but they are looking a little too sluggish today for such a strategy – don’t pick them for the first goal to be scored.
Knowing how coaches respond to circumstances is also useful for in-play betting. If a manager is prone to going defensive when going 2 – 0 up, then you need to consider whether it is worth betting on the next goal. You might be better going to the next yellow card for the opposition team who will grow increasingly frustrated by this defensive approach.
Bide your time
The easiest way to lose a lot of money when in-play betting is to get carried away. There are 90 minutes in a game, and the pattern of a match is not usually settled until after the first 20 minutes. If you are looking to spread the risk and make a profit over several bets, then just sit and learn before getting too click happy.