I recently wrote an post talking about how you could go about picking your own selections in horse racing.
The trick to doing it well is to specialize in one specific area of the sport and learn it inside out.
As I previously mentioned this concept of specialization and detailed analysis can be applied to any sport that you wish to bet on.
With football, you could specialize in following a certain league, certain teams within that league and even a specific market such as over/under 2.5 goals, or Asian Handicaps etc.
Once you have decided what you are going to specialize in you should look at various stats in order to determine how the next game might unfold.
Some of these factors are:
- Home or away – (home teams win significantly more games)
- Recent Results – ( this can suggest the current strength of the team)
- Head to Head Results – (how the team has previously performed against the team they are about to play)
- Average Number of Goals (the average number of goals a team scores in a match this season)
- Changes to the Team or Management (new players or a new manager may have a positive or negative effect on team performance or morale)
- Etc.
What factors you consider will depend on what you are planning on betting on.
For example, if you looking to see if there was any value in a bet on the over/under 2.5 goals market, you could look at the average amount of goals scored this season in matches with the two teams playing in an up and coming match.
You could also look at the number of goals that have been scored in their previous matches against each other, as well as looking at their form before each of those previous match ups and seeing how that compares to this time round.
If you found that the teams have tended to play quite defensibly against each other in the past which usually results in low scoring games, and nothing in their recent form suggests that they will play any differently this time around then their is a good chance that their next match together will be low scoring.
If you were to then look at the odds of under 2.5 goals market and saw that the bookies were offering odds of evens you could take the bet and be confident that you are getting good value as you believe that their is a greater than 50% chance that it will be a low scoring game based on your analysis.
This is a very simple example and you aren’t likely to find value bets as easy as this, at least not on most matches.
But it should give you an idea of how you can go about looking at analyzing football matches with a focus on finding value.
When you apply this type of analysis at a more in depth level (which will happen as a result of specializing) you will start to see angles that most punters and odds compilers aren’t looking at which will give you a real edge in your betting.
Until next time,
Kenny Turnbull
P.S. If you want to know what profitable bettors are betting on and have their tips sent to your inbox each day, check out the tipsters I recommend here: http://winnersodds.com/tipster-portfolio