Make sure you practice sound money management, which also includes consistent management of your balance. You are your own boss. The amounts in your betting account are part of your own assets.
Money management tips:
You need to set a limit, as only a portion of your assets should be available for sports betting. Make an honest calculation and check how much money you can lose in an extreme case to still cover your everyday costs.
A good starting point can be a tenth. For example, if you have 3,000 euros a month, you can use 300 euros for sports betting and not go bankrupt.
You should then only bet a few percent of your balance on a single bet. The more confident you are through expertise and analysis, the more you can bet.
No matter how good the odds are, you should never risk all your money in one go. Instead, you can place several small bets. At the end of the month, the goal is to make a profit across all bets anyway.
The right bet brings added value
In this context, two terms keep cropping up: Sure Bets and Value Bets.
Safe bets or surebets
are called safe bets. It’s true: no matter how the match ends, you always win.
This is of course not possible with a single bookmaker. For this you have to use several bookmakers, often smaller and unknown providers. They often assess the performance of the teams or individual athletes very differently, which leads to fluctuations in the odds. If you use this cleverly, you can sit back and relax and wait for the outcome, because you have covered all options with your safe bets.
Surebets (also called arbitrage bets) are rare in practice and require a lot of research.
But what you need if you want to make money with sports betting are value bets.
Value bets
These are particularly valuable betting odds that pay out far more money than your assumed odds.
Here’s an example: If you think Dortmund will win 50 percent of the time, but you’re offered 3.0 instead of 2.0, then that’s a clear value bet that you can bet a lot of money on (but never more than 5 percent of your bankroll). This is where your preparation pays off. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you can make money betting on football. But your chances of winning big are better.
The provider Trademate Sports promises to find the cheapest bets from at least 60 well-known bookmakers. Definitely worth a look!
The right type of bet minimizes the luck factor
Your tool of choice should be single bets. Here you can make fairly accurate predictions and do not run the risk of a large combination bet.
Professional bettors almost completely avoid compound bets. Although they have significantly higher odds of winning and look tempting, you can also lose a lot more.
In addition to result bets, you should pay particular attention to binary options. Over/Under is relatively easy to estimate. Whether it means more or less than 3.5 goals can be deduced from the statistics of both teams.
You should stay away from pure luck bets, such as betting on the next throw-in or the minute in which a goal will be scored.
Live betting is an absolute no-no for you in this context! The odds here are usually significantly worse than with pre-match tips – and this is particularly evident with lucky bets. Whether Gladbach or Wolfsburg has the next throw-in should be close to 2.0 on both sides, but the standard here is more like 1.8 and is a pretty big loss in the long run.
The right opportunities are not too low
You’ve looked for the highest odds in your bookmaker portfolio, but should you bet on the favorites or the underdogs?
Under no circumstances should you bet on your favorite team. You can place more bets on your favorite team because you certainly know more about them, but you must always remain neutral.
Top favorites should rarely be relied upon. Usually the favorite wins and you get a small prize.
However, the rate is often so low that it is hardly worth betting. For example, if you bet on a home win for FC Bayern against an underdog, the bookmaker will reward you with odds of 1.1. That means you bet 100 euros and get 110 euros back. If you deduct the German betting tax of five percent, you end up with a profit of 4.50 euros.
Do you really risk 100 euros for that? And what if it suddenly rains and a top player gets injured? The odds for favorites are also reduced by a few percent due to the reputation of the clubs and the large number of bets placed.