How To Join The Winning 5%

It is a commonly quoted line in soccer betting, even sports betting in general. For every 5 successful & profitable bettors, there are 95 unsuccessful and loss making bettors (over time).

This has come to be known as fact, even though the figures may vary just a little. However, the fact remains that it is far easier to turn a loss over a soccer season than turn a profit.

That's why there are so few professional gamblers or to coin the new-age phrase "Fulltime Sports Bettors/Traders".

If you currently bet on sports and soccer in the main, here is how you can massively improve your chances of joining the famed 5%:

Win Singles + Discipline = Long-term profits

It sounds simple enough but let me break this equation down.

Win singles, and even more so Asian handicap betting, gives you a much better chance of getting a return on your investment. For our purposes we will concentrate on win singles. It is far better to back a single team to win instead of entering into the bookmaker Utopia of soccer accumulators.

You see the reality is that it is hard enough finding one soccer opportunity that is incorrectly priced so what chance that you are going to stumble upon 3, 4, or even 5. Sound logical, eh? But how many people go into their bookmaker, pick up a coupon and get enticed into those nice little sections that are pre-printed and priced up as guaranteed minimum odds of X/Y? Sounds familiar? I'm sure it does. The accumulator markets are packaged in such a way to make it look like you are getting a great value bet for not a lot of money, but all you are really getting is a bookmaker signpost down a road where your selections are limited and where you will inevitably be let down by one result or more.

Discipline, in some ways is an even harder quality to master. By discipline I mean, the ability to not have a bet where really your research indicates there is not a bet to be had.

I will give you a recent example at Ubet4me where after diligently working through a fixture list of some 50 games, we concluded that the only incorrect price we could find that fitted our value profile of 4/6 and over, came in a Friday night fixture where 3 games were being played in league one.

As a result we brought our whole weekends betting activity forwards by 24 hours and were justifiably rewarded when Tranmere beat Luton at 5/4. We felt that this price should have been 10/11 which is a massive 0.341 value differential.

Now the discipline part kicks in because the ordinary punters, and I'm sure even our odd member will think, hang on, there is a full program of soccer tomorrow (Saturday) and there are so many games to choose from. I think I can play up my innings from Friday night.

Here is the classic punter mistake. We at Ubet4me didn't bet on Saturday simply because there was no value bet to be had. It didn't matter that there was 50 games or even 500 games taking place, because to bet without value, over any kind of term will put you firmly in the 95% category of losers. This is what I mean by discipline.

It isn't easy and temptation may prove your weakness but that is why there are so few winners in this game and so many losers.

The art of knowing when not to bet is just as powerful as knowing what to bet. It helps you protect your profits, and in the long-term keep you firmly in the unique 5% of soccer betting winners.

By: Damian Price

Damian Price is a soccer analyst at www.ubet4me.com, the UK's foremost Soccer Betting Consultancy. We are unique in sports betting as we incorporate a No Win/No Fee policy. We believe in performance-related pay.