There’s nothing quite like the excitement of laying a bet on the football on a Saturday afternoon to really get your adrenaline pumping.
A few small bets here and there can turn a game you may have had little interest in into one of the games of the season but where to start? Football is a notoriously unpredictable game with surprise results coming every week. Here’s our guide to the fundamentals, to get you started:
Do your homework
Picking out a team from the match day schedule can be a tricky business. All you have, until you do your homework, is a name. What do we mean by ‘homework’? Well, a team’s form is crucial in making your betting decision, so you should be asking yourself questions like; ‘what was their last game like? Did they win?’; ‘who scored and how many?’
By asking yourself questions like this, you’ll be able to work out the ‘in-form’ teams of the moment. Conversely, you’ll be able to work out the weakest selections in the league and bet against them.
What bet works best for you?
Defining what you want out of your bet is a good place to start. The most obvious factors are how much you’re willing to stake as well as how much you’d like to win- after all, putting ten pounds on a thousand to one bet may sound tempting but you’re more likely to lose that ten pounds than make ten thousand.
Online gaming websites often have an instant bet calculator which shows you exactly how much you’re likely to win from your proposed bets and here are two types of bet to consider laying:
Accumulator
Instead of betting a large amount on one fixture, betting on an accumulator is a great way to increase your odds at the same time as decreasing your stake. On any given day there are likely to be large favourites to win, so by putting a bet on more than one result you can massively increase your potential pay out.
Look for teams called ‘bankers’, these usually consist of three or four favourites which are there to ‘bulk out’ your accumulator- adding riskier teams at the end will increase your potential pay out further.
Of course, if you’re looking for something a little more skilful that doesn’t rely completely on others’ luck then try a few hands of poker but remembering first to read a decent poker blog.
Scorecast
Perhaps one of the more challenging bets to lay, the scorecast can simply be described as picking the correct final score. If you’ve done your homework as described above, you’ll quickly see how many goals a team is likely to score in a given match and how many another are likely to let in.
Of course, this is sometimes a lot easier said than done as football results vary massively- so you may not be correct in your prediction but you may have the comfort of an excellent afternoon’s football.
Adding the first or last goalscorer to your scorecast is a sure-fire way of massively increasing your odds- and if your team tends to rely on a single striker for their goals, it may not be a bad addition to your bet.
Jack Linsel is a freelance copy writer in London. He enjoys writing about football, sports and exercise.
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