5 Ways to Beat the Bookies

They’re our worst enemy, our nemesis, our bete noire. They offer us odds considerably worse than they should, bombard us with obnoxious adverts, close us down if we win and always seem to have some obscure rule to fall back on if you ever end up in a dispute with them.

Who are we talking about? It’s those damn bookies of course.

There is nothing sweeter than getting one over on the bookies – that thrill of picking up a big wad of cash from some smarmy bookmaker or even better, the thought of one massive win that will set you up for life.

As punters we are constantly on the hunt for a way of beating the bookies – of talking some crisp clean notes from their grubby mits.

But the question is, can you really beat the bookies in the long run? After all, the house always win, right?

Well some people do manage to manage from betting. As Doyle Brunson once said, gambling “is a hard way to make an easy living.” It can be done though and there are lots of tools and strategies out there these days to help you put one over on the bookmakers.

We have a look at five potential ways to beat the bookies – and assess if you can really slay these beasts in the long run.

1. Try Matched Betting

The best way to beat the bookies is through matched betting, which basically means using the bookies’ free bets and bonuses to give yourself lots of low-risk profit. To do this you use the exchanges like Betfair and Smarkets to lay off the free bet you have made with the bookies. It’s simple to do and can make you a load of cash with low risk.

The bookies are in fierce competition with each other for our business so offer lots of sweeteners to entice us, which the shrewd punter can take advantage of. This only really works in countries that allow free bets however, like the UK and Ireland.

You can do matched betting yourself but the best way to do it is using a matched betting product like Profit Maximiser or Profit Accumulator. They bring all the best offers together in one place, provide you with training videos on how to take advantage of the best offers and e-mail you all the best offers each week, so you never miss out on a chance to bash the bookies.

The key thing with matched betting is not to make it obvious to the bookies though, so you need to disguise your activity with some “mug betting” too. If done carefully though, you can make some additional income each month from matched betting. In our own review of Profit Maximiser for example, we made £2,469 profit.

And there are some people out there who have turned it into pretty much a full time job, making upwards of £25,000 per year!

We love matched betting, it is part of our portfolio and provides a nice steady income that we can use to bet with and just spend on other stuff. Make it part of your armory if you want to beat the bookies.

2. Use a Good Tipster

Let’s face it – to really beat the bookies at betting (without using matched betting) is a very, very hard task. The statistics show that only 2% of people who gamble actually make money and even fewer who are good enough to turn it into a full time profession.

The dedication, time and icy nerve needed to succeed at this game are things that few of us have. But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from people who have put in the time and hard work to make a living from betting.

The good news is there are some very good tipsters out there who make a consistent profit from their betting. There are the likes of Hugh Taylor and Pricewise whose tips are provided for free, but unfortunately their tips are backed so heavily that it’s nigh-on impossible to make a profit from them – as we found during our trial of Hugh Taylor.

There are some other tipsters though who aren’t followed by thousands of punters and therefore don’t suffer from the same problem. Their prices are much more obtainable and their long-term results are robust.

Here are the top three tipsters that we would recommend through our extensive research and testing:-

JK Diego’s Draw Betting System – A specialist system for betting on the draw, this has made over $100,000 profit in total and made over 100 points profit during our live trial. One of the few profitable football betting strategies we have come across.
Quentin Franks Racing – over 1,700 points profit in 7 years of tipping is a highly impressive tally from this top tipster. Mr Franks is a high-quality professional gambler with a track record up with there with the best in the business. A long-term ROI of over 15% and a strike rate of 23%.
Hanbury Racing – A horse racing tipster with over 800 points profit made since May 2020. An excellent ROI of over 30% and over 75% profitable months. A penchant for long-odds tips at over 100/1!

There are many other top tipsters to check out on our Winning Systems list. Not only can a good tipster make you a profit over the long-term, but they can also save you hours of hard work studying form and stats. They do the hard work so you don’t have to!

3. Take a Portfolio Approach to your Betting

You often hear fund managers in City banging on about having a “portfolio” of shares when you are investing in the stockmarket. The theory goes that if you have a range of stocks in different sectors and with different risk profiles, that one or two may do badly and experience some unforeseen misfortune, but that is unlikely to be a catastrophe if your investments are spread around and others are likely to do well. Not putting all your eggs in one basket is another way of putting it.

The same goes for betting – if you are thinking of following a tipster, it is probably wise to consider spreading your risk across a few different tipsters. If you have £1,000 to invest and just use it to follow one tipster, it could obviously work out great if that tipster does well. But if they just happen to have a bad patch or a run of bad luck, you could be wiped out. Following a few different tipsters – as long as they are all top quality and with proven track records – will give you a much better chance of l0ng-term success.

As with investing in the stockmarket, the idea is that as long as are careful in who you choose to follow, spreading your risk around is a much safer way of going and much less likely to wipe out your funds.

4. Find a Niche

One of the great things about the age of the internet is that it has given us bettors a wealth of information about sport at the click of a mouse. We can also compare the odds from a host of bookmakers instantly, bet with exchanges where we don’t have to worry about our accounts being closed and can access all kinds of systems and theories about betting for free.

The disadvantage of this however, is that so can everyone else! There is no longer much advantage to finding out that a team has a host of injuries for example, because everyone else knows that too. Or that a team has been struggling for goals away from home. Because with sites like soccerstats, so will most of your fellow punters.

If you are going to go it alone and try and develop your own betting strategies, the best approach is to develop a niche in a particular market.

One particular example is a former colleague of mine who worked out a system to do with corner supremacies on football matches. These are the markets that spread bet firms make to predict which team will have the most corners in a match.

So for example if Chelsea are playing Arsenal, the market may predict that Chelsea may be likely to have 1.5 more corners than Arsenal and so the spread is for a Liverpool Corner Supremacy of 1-2.

What this rather clever chap figured out by using some statistical software was that there was a fatal flaw in how the spread firms calculated these supremacies. Now the actual formula was much more complicated that this, but essentially he worked out that the spread firms put far too much emphasis on the ability of the teams and not enough on their playing styles.

So if a much stronger team was playing a weaker one – say Liverpool were playing Newcastle – the spread would be for a big supremacy for Liverpool.

However this may have ignored the playing styles of the two teams and that Newcastle had great wingers and played attacking football that led to lots of corners (we are not saying this is the case by the way, but is just used as an example).

So this chap methodically and systematically found all these instances where the spread was wrong and bet on them consistently.

He made a very considerable amount of money before the spread firms caught up to him and had to close his account, as well as change their approach. Although spread firms are supposed to not mind you winning, apparently this was not the case here and he had most of his accounts closed.

But the moral of the story was that he found a niche, spent time studying it, worked out an approach that gave him an edge and exploited it for maximum gain.

Just taking a scattergun approach of “I fancy Arsenal this weekend, they’re playing quite well” is unlikely to work. You need to find an angle, preferably an original one and something that is not well known to the betting public if you are going to beat the bookies.

If you do spend the time researching a potentially profitable angle and it does turn out to work, then it will also be much more rewarding for the time you have put in and putting one over on everyone else out there.

5. Take Each-Way Value

One of the very few quirks to the way bookies provide odds is in each-way bets. Due to the fact that the please odds are based on the win odds (at for example a quarter or a fifth of the odds), it means that sometimes the place part can represent value.

There are different ways to exploit this value, but two of the most effective we have come across are in the horse racing and golf markets.

Looking at the horse racing markets firstly, there is software that scans the each-way markets with the bookies and compares it to the exchange markets. Where value is spotted, an each-way bet can be placed. This can either be laid off with the exchanges or left to run as a value bet. Either way, these instances represent a value bet on the place part of the wager.

We ran a live trial of such software, firstly of the Each-Way Sniper software which alerts you to bets but you have to place them yourself and then the Each Way Sniper Auto-software, which is an amazing piece of kit that places the bets for you on your bookie accounts. We made an excellent £1617 profit during our live trial of the software.

It’s a similar principle with golf betting, where these days the bookies tend to offer very generous place terms up to top 8 or even top 10 for each-way bets. We ran a trial of software that exploits this, the 20 Minute System and it performed excellently, netting over 200 points profit and some excellent winners at over 100/1.

As with matched betting, you have to be careful to mask your bets with some mug bets and not to overd0 it, otherwise the bookies will limit your accounts with each-way value betting. Even when they do, you can still bet at small stakes and just make a smaller profit though.

So extracting value from the bookies with systematic each-way betting like this at value odds is one of the best ways we have come across to beat the bookies.

Conclusion

There are ways to beat the bookies, but essentially you are probably either going to need help in the form of a matched betting product or tipsters, or do a lot of hard work.

You definitely can beat the bookies because there are people out there who do it – but certainly only those who are prepared to put in the time and have rigid discipline will succeed in the long run. If you do manage to pull it off though, there is really nothing sweeter…

Please remember whatever strategy you use to take on the bookies to always bet responsibly and only risk what you can afford to lose.