Bet Smart Football
I have been thinking and writing a lot about the smart money recently. Basically, smart money is the money bet by the most prepared and effective of bettors – the true professionals. One of the more interesting – and often profitable – things to do is to try to figure out where the smart money is being bet on a game, and what that means.
You can’t just ask the sports books where the smart money is, and the smartest bettors typically don’t broadcast their bets to the general public. That means that you have to use careful observation and a few tricks to deduce where the smart money is headed in a particular game. We won’t talk about how to spot the smart money here because we have done it in other articles, but with practice it gets easy to do. What I do want to look at, though, is three situations in which the smart money is interesting, and where it can potentially point you to a profitable bet of your own:
FixedMatch.Bet provides with the football betting experts tips for helping you win all types of bets in football betting. Over and Under betting Bookmakers will give the bettor a number and they can predict the result to be either over that number or under it.
When the odds move rapidly – Sometimes you will see a line that is released and then gets violently attacked – like, for example, a football game in which the line opens up at 10 and drops to six in just hours. Lines can move that far due to heavy public action on one side, but if they change very quickly and soon after the line is posted then it is more often an indicator that the smart money has pounced on the line. The reason they have jumped on it so aggressively is usually because there is a mistake in the line. Spotting these big moves can tell you where that mistake is. There is sometimes a problem here, though – if you spot the line after all of the movement has happened then the betting by the smart money has probably corrected the error. That means that while they have gotten the value of the line error it might be there for you – even if you bet on the same side as them. It’s often not profitable, then, to bet on the same side as the smart money well after they have made their bet. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth looking at these line changes, though. The most value in spotting these moves in my eyes is that you can look closely at the game and attempt to figure out why it is that the original line was seen as a mistake by the sports bettors. The more you look at these games the better you get at spotting the errors, and the better the chances that you can spot them before they have been corrected. In short, looking for these moves and learning from them is a great way to make you a better bettor.
When a game moves in the opposite direction to what you would expect – You can’t easily find out how much money has been bet on each team in a particular game. What you can find out, though, is how many bets have been placed on each team. When we see a game in which a huge majority of the bets – 70 percent or more – are on one team we would typically expect the odds for that team to get less attractive. That’s because the books generally like to have action that is closed to balanced so that they can make profits with little risk, so they will change the lines to attract action to one team to achieve that balance. Sometimes, though, we will see games in which the large majority of bets are on one team, yet the line moves to make that team even more attractive. What that tells us is that the small number of bettors on the less popular team have bet more money than the large number of bettors on the popular team. If the team moves significantly then we know that the smart money has bet the game aggressively. It can often be profitable by betting against the public in these situations. This is also a great way to spot teams that are ready to pull off a big upset – something that can lead to very profitable moneyline bets.
As luck is no coincidence, betting smart on football and on any other sports requires a certain preparation and discipline. The preparation can be summarized to doing your own analysis on each. Is the smart money on a low-scoring matchup favoring the Chargers? Or should bettors expect enough offense for the Saints to cover? Thankfully, our NFL PRO Report details the sharp way to bet both the spread and over/under for tonight’s Chargers vs. Saints Monday Night Football matchup. Saints Spread Betting Pick. The best NFL picks and predictions for Feb 04, 2021. Get our best pro football bets for today as well as news, scores, odds, consensus, and more!
When nothing of note happens in a high profile game – When a game is high profile – a nationally televised game between big name teams – then the betting action will often be significantly higher than it is for most games in the sport. If the line hasn’t moved significantly in a high profile game, and the number of bets is reasonably balanced between the sides, then it is safe to assume that the smart money hasn’t weighed in heavily on one side or the other. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t bet on these games just because the smart money may not have. Not at all. What it means, though, is that the line that is posted is probably pretty accurate – if it wasn’t then the smart money would have moved it until it was – so you should only bet on the game if you see a significant edge for one of the teams based on your handicapping.
Pre match trading is when we look to enter and exit a trade before the start of a football match.
This is also a popular strategy when trading horses and is known as pre race trading in the horse racing markets.
In truth you can trade any sport pre event if there is enough liquidity to get your money in and out of the market .
If there is very little money in a market then it can becomes difficult to get your money in and out of the market at the prices you want.
Pre Match trading is my favourite strategy for tackling the sports trading markets and it can be a very effective way of making money.
Perhaps the best way to explain a pre match trade is with an example.
Pre Match Trading Example
Lets take a look at the above example when Manchester United played Reading in the FA cup.
There was a simple reason for this trade. Sometimes good pre match trades can have very simple reasoning.
The main reason for this trade being that Man United have a very strong squad and even a second string side was likely to have great quality players involved.
Looking at historical odds the price of 1.26 is a similar price to when Man United had faced lower tier Premier League sides such as Burnley and Hull.
Reading are a Championship side at the time of writing and given the above factors among others it was predicted that it was more likely for Manchester United to shorten in odds then drift.
Stakes of £2000 were used for this trade. It is important to note that this was not the total amount of money at risk as we are trading out before kickoff.
Pre match Trading Example 2
Let’s take a look at another pre match trade.
This time it is in the sport of NFL, trading using information that key players would be missing from a team.
In the above example we have a game between the Cleveland Browns and the Denver Bronco’s.
I made this trade using the sports betting exchange Smarkets. Currently I have a 0% commission deal due to being a member of Oddsmonkey.
So when possible I use Smarkets exchange to place my trades.
On the right side of this image you will see the amount of money matched on my trade. In this trade I backed the Cleveland Browns at an average price of 2.03 for £2906. The next day I was able to lay the Cleveland Browns at 1.79.
To break this down a little bit more.
In the above example you can see that I placed back bets totaling £2906.67 at odds of 2.03
If this was a traditional bet this would mean I would be staking £2906.67 to win £2993.87
2906.67 X 1.03 = 2993.87
So for every £1 placed.
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A return of £1.03 would be made if the Cleveland Browns win the game.
However as mentioned earlier betting exchanges allow you the option to basically sell your odds (lay betting). Lay betting is when you bet against a team to win. The next day I closed my position on the game by placing a lay bet.
My only reasoning for this trade was that new information had come to light regarding the Denver Broncos line up. News had come out suggesting that key players would be missing from the upcoming match against Cleveland.
When opening the trade my plan was to allow the market to react to the news.
Then exit the next day for a profit when the news had spread around the sporting world. What happened was that people started to back Cleveland and odds on Denver had to rise. This in turn meant that the odds on Cleveland would have to drop.
Pre Match Trading Outcomes
In this example I ended up laying £3807 at odds of 1.79
This meant that for every £0.79 invested I would win £1 should they lose.
£3807.85 X 0.79 = £3008
This gave me the following outcomes:
Cleveland Browns win = £2906 risk to win £2993
Cleveland Browns lose = £3008 risk to win £3807
This left me with the following outcomes:
Cleveland win £2993 – £3008 = -£15
Cleveland loss £3807 – £2906 = £901
Rather then leave the majority of my profit on one outcome. I hedged my profit across both outcomes so that I would make a decent profit no matter who won the game.
Hedging means backing both outcomes of an event in order to reduce your overall risk. This is what you can see in the example above. A profit of £457 should Cleveland win or a profit of £448 should Denver win.
Here is a video explaining the trade.
Why do odds move prematch?
Lets now take a look at the reason’s odds move.
How can you use information prior to a game to make a good pre match trade?
Odds move before a game starts for a variety of reasons.
New information may enter the market such as
- Player injuries
- The manager may get sacked
- Coach may comment that he is resting players
- Weather Conditions
- New Signings
Money also moves the markets.
When a large betting syndicate sees value in certain odds they will bet large amounts of money which will shorten the odds on the selection they see as value.
The last performance of a side can also effect the odds for a future game.
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If for example Liverpool play on a Wednesday night in the Champions League away at Fenerbache and the game goes into extra time. You would see an affect on the odds for their upcoming game against Everton on the Sunday.
This is because the market would perceive that Liverpool players would be extra tired. They may have to rest players. As a result the market would see them as having a lower probability of winning the game on Sunday so their odds would most likely drift.
I hope you have enjoyed this article and perhaps learnt something from it.
Pre Match trading is an excellent strategy to use in the sports betting markets.