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Accumulators Explained: If you place a double or a treble, you have placed 2 or 3 bets respectively. ALL your bets need to win, for you to make a profit (and get your stake back). If all your bets don’t win, you lose your stake and don’t get any profit. If your first bet wins, BOTH the winnings and the stake are combined to become the stake for the second bet etc. 4 bets can be called a fourfold. 5 bets can be called a fivefold. 6 bets can be called a sixfold. Although, all the above work in the same way (all the bets have to win, for you to make a return and get your original stake back), technically only 4 bets and above are called accumulators (although some people still decide to call doubles and trebles accumulators). Accumulators suffer from overround multiplication issue.

• Let’s say you have £60 to bet in total, on 4 bets at odds of 3/1, 4/1, 5/1, and 6/1.
  If you bet £15 on each of this outcomes separately, you stand to make the following profit on each bet (and get your £15 stake back):
  • 3/1 : £45
    4/1: £60
    5/1: £75
    6/1: £90
    If all the selections won you would get £270 in profit (and get your £60 of stakes back).

Overround Explained: The odds offered by bookmakers are unlikely to correspond exactly to the actual probabilities of the outcomes in any market happening, as no bookmaker is likely to operate without trying to offset its costs (and trying to make a little something on top)! Bookmakers are likely to be taking money from lots of customers over the possible outcomes – they may try to guarantee themselves a profit regardless of the result. Bookmakers may start a market by working out the actual probabilities of the outcomes in a market occurring and then incorporating a profit margin into the odds, but as money comes in on the market they will often adjust prices to attract less or more money to particular outcomes – e.g. they may want to limit their liability on an outcome they already face a big payout on if it comes through, or they may want to attract more money to different outcome(s) to one(s) they already have taken a lot of money on to guarantee a profit or minimise potential losses. How do bookmakers use overround to try and make profits?

As an example, here are the odds a bookmaker was offering, at the time of writing, on an upcoming Rugby Union match.… Read the rest

When placing a bet with your bookmaker on a horse race, you may see each horse’s form indicated. You can also see horse racing form in newspapers which carry race cards. What do the letters, numbers, and other characters mean?

They tell you how each horse has performed in their most recent races. This may help you decide how each horse will perform in the current race that you are thinking of betting on. The important thing to remember is that the rightmost entry is the most recent race, the 2nd entry from the right is the 2nd most recent race, etc.

A number from 1 to 9, means that the horse finished in that position (a limitation of the form guide, is that it does not tell you how many horses ran in that race). If the horse finished outside of the top 9, the number 0 is shown. If the horse did not finish the race, you will see the reason indicated by one of the following letters: B,F,P,R,S,U which respectively stand for Brought down, Fell, Pulled up, Refused, Slipped up, and Unseated rider. You might also see the following characters: – is used to separate years, and / is used to separate racing seasons.… Read the rest

The most standard bet you could make is a win bet. You will only make a profit if your selection wins. So, if you make a £5 bet at 7/1 at your favourite bookmaker you will make a £35 profit if your selection wins (and get your £5 stake back, if you win). Another common bet, is an Each-Way Bet. If you place an each-way bet on a single event, you are effectively making two separate bets. One bet is on a win only basis, and one is on a place basis.

• A place bet, allows you to make a profit if your selection finishes not just first, but also in a certain number of other places (e.g. 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. depending on what the bookmaker is offering). Usually, you will receive a proportion of the win odds.
• So, if you have £5 to bet with in total on an Each-Way Bet, you could place a £2.50 each-way bet – this means £2.50 goes on the Win part, and £2.50 goes on the each-way part. Let’s say you bet on an outcome offering 7/1 odds if its wins, and 1/3 the win odds (in this case 7/3) if it places in the top 2.

There are many variations of this scam. Hopefully you will fully understand this betting tip scam explanation, and so will be able to avoid such scams. If you didn’t spot this betting tip scam, you were a victim of survival bias (you were only thinking of the people who made it through a selection process, and ignored those that didn’t). Don’t worry, here’s the betting tip scam explanation:

• What has happened here is the ‘tipster’ sent say 10,000s of e-mails – some of which backed all the possible outcomes in the first event. You just happened to be in the group that the correct tip was sent to the first time.
• The second time, the ‘tipster’ e-mails only the group that he had previously sent the 1st winning tip to, and divides them into new groups backing each of the outcomes in the 2nd event.
• Again and again, this process is repeated.
• Provided the ‘tipster’ started out with a sufficiently large number of recipients to begin with, to a certain number of people it will look like the ‘tipster’ got a large number of tips in a row correct from the start.
• The people who received a wrong tip at any time were no longer e-mailed, and they probably didn’t think much of it.

Although there are many tipsters who attempt to provide genuine tips, there are some scams out there you need to avoid! Can you spot this well known betting tip scam – variations of which still catch people out?

• Let’s say you are sent an e-mail purporting to contain a betting tip that’s certain to come in on an event tonight? You don’t pay much attention to the e-mail, as it seems like a piece of spam. Later when you are watching TV you catch the end of the event the tipster predicted. In the back of your head you seem to remember the outcome might have been the same as the tip. You go back and check your e-mail, and the tipster got it right, but you don’t think much of it.
• The same day the following week, again you get an e-mail from the same sender with another betting tip. You still don’t think much of it, but this time decide to remember the tip to check it later. You check the result later, and the tip came in. He just got lucky, you say!
• The following week, another e-mail with another betting tip drops in your inbox – this time you are intrigued, and decide to tune in to the event the tipster bet on, and it wins!

Numerous websites and software tools have popped up which claim to allow you to spot guaranteed profitable betting opportunities, by taking advantage of the differing prices on outcomes in the same market between different bookmakers. We explained how you could start to find the best value markets at your favourite bookmaker. This involves working out the overround on a particular market. The lower the overround the better. However, these websites and tools take this a step further, and claim to be able to find opportunities (by placing bets at multiple bookmakers, on different outcomes in the same market) when there will effectively be no overround, and in fact the book will be less than 100%. This is called arbitrage betting. We strongly recommend you avoid arbitrage betting. Although, the opportunities they spot will be real (if you are using a reputable service), we still recommend you avoid this form of betting. There is usually a fee involved to use these services, and even though the opportunities to make a profit might be there in theory, in practice they are difficult to profit from.

Why avoid arbitrage betting? Your account may be closed, or bets revoked.

• Bookmakers generally hate arbitrage betting.

• Wisdom of the Crowd refers to the phenomenon that a large number of individuals in a group, will usually be able to make better decisions than any individual in that group.
• For example, at a funfair say their was a big jar with an unknown amount of marbles. People were asked to guess the number of marbles (with the closest getting a prize). If you took all the guesses and averaged them (provided there was a sufficient number of people in the group) it would usually come close to the actual number of marbles in the jar. Obviously, the more people who participated the closer to the actual number you would get.
• This happens, because individual noise is filtered out.
• In the case of betting odds, Wisdom of the Crowd also has an effect as bookmakers are forced to lower prices getting a lot of betting action (and increase prices not getting a lot). So, highly backed outcomes get their prices lowered, and less well back outcomes get their prices increased.
• However, for Wisdom of the Crowd to work people have to be making rational and independent decisions. In the case, of marbles in the jar at the funfair this may be the case.