Last time I mentioned that you should stick to what you know when placing bets. One of the reasons main reasons for this was so as to minimise the time you have to spend making the strategy work.
Last night saw some football matches I was following. For the sake a a few seconds I was able to place two bets, admittedly at very low odds, on games I wouldn’t have bet on before play started and achieve more growth on my investment. Worth looking at for easy gains.
You may have noticed that the events I have been betting on have so far been limited to certain types of event and certain sports. (You can view my bets here.) There is a reason for this, simply that these are sports I follow and enjoy.
There are two reasons for the importance of this part of my strategy for handling my investment. The first, if they are sports/events I know and understand there is more chance of me making a well informed decision about which bets to place. Looking at one of my football bets, Holland to beat Macedonia, I follow football and knew that this should be an easy win for the Dutch. If you don’t follow football, despite the low odds suggesting a win for Holland is by far the most likely outcome, you will have a much higher degree of uncertainty about the result.
The second reason is if you follow a particular sport anyway, you are not really investing any additional time in order to place the bets. Using the same football game as an example, I was looking at who was playing that night anyway. The only extra thing I had to do was pick out any potential bets and then place them, something which took minutes. Effectively I have found the bet by doing something I would be doing anyway, so the only investment of my time is actually placing the bet. On the other hand if you weren’t following football you would be spending time looking for the bet (if you are trawling in general through all options it could take some time to find the ones you want), then researching if it was a good one to take or not. Remember, we are looking to beat the bank, (it take a few minutes to open a bank account and deposit money) a return of 10% would be great but is that extra 6%-7% return worth spending hours finding the right bets?
A final word of warning, just because you are knowledgeable about and follow a particular sport, doesn’t mean you should bet on it. The bet must fit in with the rest of the strategy too.
I’m a week in to my little experiment now and its been a busier week than I thought it would be so I’ll share with you the bets I have made so far.
| Bet | Odds | Result |
| Specials(Dancing on ice) - Donal to not get perfect 30 | 1.05 | Win |
| UFC 97 - Anderson Silva Win | 1.18 | Open |
| Politics - General Election Jan 2010 or later | 1.20 | Open |
| F1 - Lewis Hamilton to beat Jenson Button | 1.57 | Open |
| Tennis - Roger Federer beat Kevin Kim | 1.02 | Win |
| Tennis - Novak Djokovic beat Frank Dancevic | 1.07 | Win |
| Tennis - Andy Roddick beat Diego Junqueira | 1.02 | Win |
| Tennis - Elena Dementieva beat Anastasia Pivovarova | 1.04 | Win |
| Tennis - Ana Ivanovic beat Mariya Koryttseva | 1.07 | Win |
| Tennis - Dinara Safina beat Mathilde Johansson | 1.04 | Win |
| Football - Italy beat Montenegro | 1.57 | Open |
| Football - Germany beat Liechtenstein | 1.02 | Open |
| Football - Denmark beat Malta | 1.14 | Open |
In a week I have made a profit of £0.31. If I can keep this up I will have a total of £116.16 after a year, that’s equivalent to 16.16% AER if it was in a savings account!. So while 31p may sound insignificant, as the saying goes, ‘take care of the pennies and the pounds look after themselves’. But as I said at the start of this post, I have been a little bit busier than I expected to be in this first week, (I’ll explain why in my next post) so I don’t expect to keep up this rate of return for the full year. If nothing else, I am sure there will be a few losses at least over the year.
Next time I’ll expand on my strategy a little more and explain why I think I have already made a couple of mistakes by deviating from it.
