Bet recording
Record your bets!
Anyone that is serious about trying to make money in the long run with sports betting is obliged to do this: bet recording. As soon as you start with betting you should in fact record your bets (which admittedly no one does…; the author here not even being the one exception). But as you do not do this and gather your experience you may well notice that your wallet is not getting wider, it is in turn getting smaller.
When you notice this you may start to look around for some serious and honest advice. Which still turns out to be hard to find. Still your expertise and understanding is growing and you notice: it isn’t all as simple as I thought in the first place. There is a little more behind it than „knowing your sports“ you bet on. It is about knowing and understanding the maths.
So one very serious — but also rarely taken — advice is to record some paper bets for a start. It is pretty important that you work out a certain system (compared to just gambling around a bit) and test this system. Obviously and repeatedly mentioned here: betty offers you the perfect opportunity to do so and follow this simple system: bet only when the probability is in an advantageous relation to the price, which means: market price is higher than true price. Ok, we know and understand this, but still it is worth repeating it here or there.
Do it on paper. There is no harm done by that. You just would like to know, how well you get along with this approach. Should you really produce some decent results after a while you may happily start betting real money. I know what people are afraid of. It is as simple as that: they are afraid their system is good and produces what they expected from it — but they „wasted“ all the money they would have won by their paper bets so have so carefully recorded. Even on top of it they might be afraid: „Now I have done it on paper and see it is working. If I bet some real money the results will go the other way.“
Well, if this should happen it would be a matter of either bad luck or of not enough bets been recorded. So keep going, renew your system, think it over, adjust your settings in betty, try to learn a bit more and become better. But also to be noted: it is not very likely to happen. And in fact: as soon as your system produced those winnings (on paper) it should be reproduced for real money anyway. And you would feel a lot more comfortable about it.
Anyway people do not follow this advice, although it is real serious and here the author is this one exception. Although started with some bets not worked out properly (and even being successful with those) he still stopped doing it and decided to first do a proper calculation system (the one you see and can use now in betty), then so some paper bet recording (for about half a year) and after this produced some decent winnings (of about 5% flat) he decided to do it for real money.
If you „can’t wait“ you still are not doing much wrong. Although not recommended, we most likely can’t stop you from trying out your new discovered system with all-by-your-own responsibility and expertise introduction (which makes the author also get excited about) you still needed to record your bets.
There is a certain set of data you need to keep track of. This would be: the match you bet on (it could well be „the instance you bet on“), the price you get for that, the outcome of the game (event) and thus the win or loss of the bet, including the payout. The two extra columns you needed would be the true price and the reciprocal of the price you got.
The reciprocal of the price you get is very important. This is an approximation to the probability. As we all know that we want this probability to be higher than the reciprocal of the price, but we need this value as a benchmark test. If you record this reciprocal in the long run and sum up all those probabilities. The total sum here will tell you, how many hits you needed at least to break even. So if you have more hits than this break-even point you should be winning in the long run.
The column with your true prices, which should be supplemented as well by the one with the reciprocal of that, will tell you in the long run how many hits you expected. Any probability you calculated reflects an amount of hits you expected. Summing them up tells you how many hits you had been dreaming of, provided your calculations are good.
You results in the long run (be it in paper betting like that or betting real money) should produce you hits of somewhere between the ones you needed to break even and the ones you expected. You won’t hit as many as you expected because you are opposing market with your bet. So there is little chance that the probability is higher than you even thought. It is most likely „corrected“ towards market price. But whenever you land somewhere between break even and expected you are doing fine.