We’ve been running Honest Betting Reviews for over four years now (how time flies eh!) and in that time there has been one horse racing tipster who has stood out above the rest.

Our number one recommended horse racing tipster has been producing fantastic results since we first reviewed his service over four years ago.

The tipster in question is called Quentin Franks Racing and since we’ve been following his tips, he’s made an astonishing 1,200 points profit.

That’s over £12,000 profit to £10 stakes or £30,000 profit to £25 stakes.

All at a return on investment of over 18% and making a profit at Betfair SP.

Now the really great news is you can get a completely FREE trial of Quentin’s tips for 10 days now.

Get your FREE 10 day trial here.

No credit card details required, just sign up and you will receive the tips free of charge for 10 days, with no catches.

This trial offer is only around for a limited time though, so don’t miss out.

Sign up for a FREE trial here and see why this is our number one recommended horse racing tipster.

Mastering football trading is one of the hardest skills possible. Most people who try football trading tend to dabble in well-known strategies such as laying the draw or trading the over/under markets and at first it can seem easy, but then the tough reality sets in when results go against them or something unexpected happens and the losses mount up. 

To trade the football markets successfully takes a great deal of skill, research and planning. It takes rigid discipline and sticking to a gameplan no matter what and very few do it successfully. 

There are some useful tools out there to help with trading football so you don’t have to just “go it alone” and try and figure it all out for yourself. We’ll take a look at some of the tools you can use as well as analyse the pitfalls to avoid and how you can become a profitable football trader.

Football Trading – The Basics

Just like any other form of trading, with football trading you are trying to back high and lay low to guarantee yourself a profit whatever happens. You are not interested in the ultimate result of a match, just the price swings that occur in it. 

To trade you will need to join an exchange like Betfair or Smarkets, both of which have a wide variety of markets to trade. Some of the most popular markets to trade include:-

• – Match Odds (1×2)
• – Over/under 1.5/2.5/3.5 goals
• – Correct Score
• – Half Time result
• – Half Time score
• – Both Teams to Score

It is best to concentrate on the markets with most liquidity if you are going to trade because you don’t want to risk your bets not being matched or give up value by taking prices that are worse than the odds should be. 

Obviously the factors that most affect the odds during a football match are:-

• – Goals
• – Red cards
• – Time decay

Essentially having so few variables makes football quite a predictable sport to trade. Prices will move in quite a steady way until there is a goal when they will change dramatically. 

Knowing how prices will move as a result of a particular event is crucial to your trading. You want to know exactly what the potential profit and loss will be from a particular trade and to work out the risk/reward on that basis. 

For example, if you are laying the draw between two fairly evenly-matched teams and the odds of the draw are 3.5 to start off with and there is a goal in the first half, the odds will normally move to around 4.5. 

Make sure you study the markets first and understand how prices will move before you start trading the football markets.

Where to Start From – Study the Stats

If you are going to trade football, a good point to start from is to study the stats. Certain leagues and teams have a tendency to follow familiar patterns which can make them good for trading. 

Websites such as flashscores and soccerstats have good stats databases for you to use as a basis for your trading. 

If you are going to be trading the unders early on in a match for example, it would be a good idea to look at teams who have a record of keeping things tight early on and not seeing too many goals. 

Or if you were looking to lay the draw at HT it might be an idea to focus on teams who score a lot their goals in the second half and therefore have a strong chance of breaking the deadlock. 

Spending even a short amount of time before a game studying the teams and their recent form can really pay dividends if you are looking to trade on the football. 

Best Trading Tools and Software

These days there are a number of top trading tools and packages that can really help with your trading and provide a path to profit. Here are the some of the best we have come across through our extensive testing and reviews:-

• Goal Profits – a multi-award winning trading service, Goal Profits combines trading strategies, guides on how to trade, stats, a chat room where you can follow along with professional traders, daily trade selections and top customer support together in one excellent package. It was voted Best Football System by our members in our annual awards and has won numerous other accolades. A hugely popular service and if you are looking to take your football trading seriously then this is a good place to start. 
• Trade on Sports – run by a team of professional traders, Trade on Sports is a service built on the foundation of a vast stats database that produces alerts you can follow via the messenger app Telegram. There are a few different alerts but the main one we followed in our live trial of the service was their HT Overs Bot, which made over £4,000 in our review. You can also make use of the stats yourself to create your own strategies and there is a lively chat community as well. One of the very best trading services we have come across. 
• If you don’t have the time to spend hours in front of a screen trading football matches then there is an excellent alternative in the form of Auto Pro Trader. It is a platform that allows you to follow professional traders automatically, with their trades copied onto your Betfair account. So you can go about your day and do other things whilst the pros trade on your behalf, creating a passive income opportunity. 

So if you are looking to get into football trading, these are three quite different but equally useful services we have tried and tested ourselves and found to be of considerably benefit. 

Some Basic Strategies to Get Going With

If you are looking to “go it alone” however and have a go at trading yourself, here are some basic strategies you could use to get you going:-

Lay the Draw – possibly the best known of all trading strategies, this approach involves laying the draw at the start of a game and trading out at some stage during the match. There are different ways to trade this strategy and we have outlined our own thoughts on it here.

Over/Under trading – another popular trading method involves trading the over/under markets. One way to do this is to back under 2.5 goals before the game and then to trade out after 15-20 mins. If there hasn’t been a goal then you will often get a nice move down in the odds and a good profit. If there is a goal you will need to trade out for a loss, so it is best to focus on teams who don’t tend to score/concede early if following this strategy. Another approach is to hedge with for example laying under 3.5 goals, then if there is an early goal you will be in fairly neutral position but if there isn’t you can trade out the 2.5 position for profit and leave the 3.5 to run.

Lay the Draw at HT – a variant on laying the draw at HT, this strategy involves laying the draw in games that are drawing at half time. It reduces the risk as the draw price will be much lower at HT than at the start and will also provide more profit if there is a goal. You can also hedge to a certain extent by covering the correct score, although generally you will need a late goal to generate a profit if doing so. 

Conclusion – Go Against the Crowd to Beat the Market

Winning at football trading is not easy and if you are going to make long-term profits it pays to do your research, use the best tools available and remained disciplined at all times. 

It also pays to go against the crowd and develop your own way of trading that not everyone else is doing. Find a niche and work on perfecting it as a good approach to all forms of betting and trading.

Whatever strategies you use, good luck with your trading and please gamble responsibly. 

The question of how much money you can make from betting on sports is a tricky one. It is rather like asking “how long is a piece of string?” 

However, there are some fundamental aspects to betting on sports you should take into account when considering this question. In a best-case scenario for example, the top professional gamblers in the world make millions from their betting, so in theory if you reached their level you could become very wealthy from it. 

Most people however would never be able to risk as much money as the top professionals, so a more realistic approach is to look at how much you could make from a reasonable starting bank of say £1,000 (or $1,000). 

With techniques like matched betting, arbitrage and value betting or following some top tipsters, it is possible to make a healthy second income of a few hundred pounds or dollars per month. 

Let’s take a deeper dive into looking at how much money you can make from sports betting and exactly how to do it.

The Best Case Scenario – The Big Shots

If you are really, really good at gambling then there is the possibility to make a very large amount of money from it. The likes of Bill Benter and Alan Woods have reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars from betting on the horses. They shared many similarities, both having an early fascination with the book Beat the Dealer, which applies statistical and mathematical probability to games of chance. Both also made their fortunes in Hong Kong, using computer models to extract extraordinary levels of profit from the racetracks there.  

Gambler Alan Woods made millions from the racetracks in Hong Kong.

Making such fortunes is a very rare thing of course and most people would simply not have the funds to bet at the level Benter and King did, wagering hundreds of thousands on a single race on a regular basis.

However, there are other successful gamblers who have made money from more realistic staking – notably the likes of Angus Loughran, Tony Ansell and Derek McGovern, who all reportedly made a good living from their betting activity. A word of warning though, Mr Loughran (also known as “Statto” from his days on Fantasy Football) was forced to declare bankruptcy a few years ago, so perhaps his gambling went through a rough patch at one stage.

Now of course there are a new breed of gamblers, those who make their living from the betting exchanges like Caan Berry, Kevin Haskell, Mark Iverson and many others. These individuals tend to trade the markets rather than gamble on them, but apparently make a very good income from doing so.   

Taking a Realistic Approach

Of course for most people the idea of giving up the day job and becoming a professional gambler is pretty remote and only a very small number of people have ever done so successfully. More realistically, if you are looking to supplement your income with some shrewd sports betting, how much could you plausibly expect to make?

Well, let’s have a look at some examples of some successful tipsters and systems and how much money you could expect to make from them given a certain starting bank.

Let’s say for example you started off with a £1,000 betting bank and decided to follow a top tipster. How much could you expect to make?

At the high end, if you had followed a tipster like Quentin Franks since he started tipping in 2014 and bet just £10 per point, your £1,000 bank would have turned into over £15,000 in just five years, which is no mean feat.  

Similarly if you had followed Russell Blair Racing since he commenced tipping in 2015 and bet at £10 per point, you would have made over £19,000 in just over four years. 

Of course, these are the very top tipsters so you cannot expect other tipsters will match those levels, or even that these two tipsters will necessarily continue at such an exceptional standard – although we hope they will! 

More sensibly we would expect a good tipster to double their betting bank over the course of a year, so be able to turn £1,000 into £2,000 over the course of 12 months. That would be a strong return on capital compared to most other forms of investing.  

Following a portfolio of tipsters is a way of managing risk.

If you have a big enough betting bank to follow a number of tipsters at the same time then you could make a decent income from their combined profits. Tipsters Empire for example have a “Portfolio Package” whereby you can subscribe to five tipsters at once for a big discount. Following all five tipsters has made over £8,000 to £10 stakes at the time of writing, which translates into a few hundreds per month in extra income. Following a portfolio approach also spreads the risk in case one tipster has a particularly bad run, it would hopefully be balanced out by the others. 

Compounding Your Profits

One way you can really accelerate your profits is to use compounding, which Albert Einstein called the “eighth wonder of the world.” 

The above examples are all using flat staking of just placing £10 per point, but if you were to stake a percentage of your bank on each occasion, you could actually grow your bank much more substantially. Betting 1% of your bank using the above examples of Quentin Franks and Russell Blair would have grown your bank even more significantly than just using flat stakes and could have generated over £50,000 profit over the same period. 

At some stage of course you would want to take out some of your profits, so in most cases you wouldn’t have just let things run for that whole period. Even taking out some profits from time to time however, the compounding model can be very powerful. 

Reducing Risks 

Matched betting is a great way to generate low-risk profits on a regular basis.

At the other end of the scale of course it is important to recognise that you could lose money from gambling. No matter how well a tipster or strategy has performed in the past, there is no guarantee they will continue doing so in the future. That is why it is essential to set aside a betting bank that you can afford to lose and recognise that if everything goes wrong, you could lose the entire lot. With proven tipsters it happens rarely but is a risk. 

If you want to take a lower risk approach then you could try matched betting and value betting. Matched betting through a package such as Profit Maximiser can generate a very good regular income, with some people making up to £20,000 per year from it for very little risk.

Unfortunately matched betting is only available to people in countries that allow free bets and bonuses, which at the moment is mainly restricted to the UK and Ireland. 

If you live elsewhere then value betting is a good alternative through software such as Each Way Sniper. It identifies value each-way bets with the bookies whereby the odds of the place part of the bet are higher than the actual chances of winning. Some bets will lose but over time and the course of hundreds of bets, it is as close to guaranteed profit as you can get and many people make £500-£1,000 per month from it, which is a great additional income.  

The problem with both matched betting and value betting is that ultimately you are likely to have your bookie accounts closed or restricted by doing them, so both are somewhat time-limited. However, there are steps you can take to keep your accounts open as long as possible and maintain those profits for a good period.   

Conclusion

You can certainly make a decent second income from betting by following a portfolio of top tipsters or doing matched betting and value betting. 

How much you can make depends on how much you have to start with, but even with as little as £1,000 you can turn that into a decent revenue stream of a few hundreds pounds a month through smart betting. 

Matched and value betting is the safest way of doing this, but are both time-limited as eventually your bookie accounts will be restricted. 

Following successful tipsters is another good option but does come with risk, so always make sure you set aside a sensible betting bank that you can afford to lose and be prepared to stay patient and recognise there will be losing runs. 

With the right mindset and strategy though it is possible to make some good money from betting, even if you never end up making millions like pro punters Bill Benter and Alan Woods.  

Done correctly, matched betting is as safe as houses, but some things can go wrong if you don’t take care. We will look in detail at some potential pitfalls and how to stay safe. But first, a quick refresher as to what matched betting is all about.

What is matched betting?

Matched betting is a way of exploiting offers made by bookmakers such as free bets as sign-up bonuses and ongoing incentives by betting on both outcomes of an event. You are guaranteed to win, and it’s all 100% legal.

Here is a simple example. A bookmaker is offering a £25 free bet on a sporting event if you bet £25. You bet £25 on team A with the bookmaker and lay a bet on team A with a betting exchange (such as Betfair). The amount you lay will depend on the odds, but you should adjust your bet to return around £25 should team A lose.

Assume team A loses. You lose £25 with the bookmaker, but you gain close to £25 from Betfair. You are likely to lose a small amount of money including the Betfair commission, but you also gain a free £25 bet. If team A won, then your bet with the bookmaker would win, and you would also receive a free bet. You would, of course, have around a £25 loss on Betfair. So, whatever the outcome you have almost broken even and have a free £25 bet.

Now you repeat the process using your free bet with the bookmaker and matching it with a lay bet on the exchange. Whatever the outcome, you will have converted that free bet into profit.

Matched betting can be very rewarding when done right, with thousands of pounds of low-risk profit available.

There are some great services like Profit Maximiser which bring together all the offers and show you how to set them up with ease. During our live trial using Profit Maximiser we made £2,469 profit with very little risk, which is pretty much all you can ask for. 

So, what can go wrong?

You can keep doing that time after time using the hundreds of free bets offered by bookmakers. So, what could possibly go wrong? Why can’t you keep generating profit every week? Theoretically, you can. Some people claim to make a regular income of up to £600 a month using matched betting.  However, two things can go wrong: human error and getting gubbed.

Human error

Matched betting is reasonably complicated. If you don’t have a head for basic maths. Then perhaps it isn’t for you. But even if you are good with figures, things can go wrong. We can all lose concentration occasionally and make mistakes. For instance, getting a substantial lay wrong can be very expensive if you fail to fix it in time. The message is DON’T MAKE MISTAKES. Keep a careful track of your bets and lays, preferably documenting everything in a spreadsheet.

Account gubbing

Bookmakers don’t like matched betting and will try to stop matched betters in their tracks. Gubbing is having your account limited by the bookmaker. This might take the form of banning you from promotions such as free bets and limiting your maximum stake, often to a derisory amount. And the main reason why people get gubbed is the bookmaker suspects they are using matched betting.

But how do bookmakers know you are matched betting? Every punter’s account is monitored by the bookmaker using algorithms that probably know more about your betting habits than you know yourself. They know precisely how every kind of punter behaves, including matched betters. To avoid being flagged up as a matched better, you should disguise the fact by giving the impression you are a typical everyday punter. This means:

• – Don’t bet exclusively on promotions. Mix your matched betting with ordinary bets. You can lay these at a betting exchange to protect your stake, so you won’t win or lose significant amounts, but you will disguise your real purpose.
• – Don’t focus entirely on high-value bets that are significantly better than lay odds. Again, this is likely to flag you as a matched better.

Finally

If you take the precautions we have mentioned, matched betting really is as safe as houses, and there are guaranteed profits to be made. Just be careful and take your time. You will be amazed by how much risk-free money you can make.

And if you use a top service like Profit Maximiser you can make up to £500 per month tax free from matched betting. 

There is much debate about sports arbitrage betting. Advocates consider it to be a great way to deliver an almost guaranteed profit, while many detractors find it too risky due to its complications and possible implications once bookmakers discover this is what you are doing.  Here we will look at both sides of this argument and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

What is Sports Arbitrage?

Arbing, as sports arbitrage is commonly called, is a betting scheme where punters place multiple bets with multiple bookmakers in such a way as to guarantee a profit whatever the outcome of the events. It works by exploiting odds differences between different bookmakers.

Let’s say for example there is a tennis match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. One bookie has Federer at 11/10 (2.1), whilst another bookie has Nadal at 6/5 (2.2).

You could bet £100 on both players at the two bookies and be guaranteed a profit whatever happens. 

If Federer wins the match, you win £110, minus the £100 you put on Nadal, leaving you with £10 profit.

If Nadal wins the match, you win £120, minus the £100 you put on Federer, leaving you with £20 profit.

Now it is worth noting firstly that you are unlikely to get such a good arb on a high-profile match like this, but it is just an example. Secondly if you are going to arb on tennis, pay attention to the bookies’ terms and conditions as they vary on what happens if a player retires hurt. Some pay out on the result regardless whereas others will count it as a void bet.  

As the odds differences in arbs are usually minimal, you need to invest a large sum of money to make a relatively small profit. But if your profit is guaranteed, it’s the same as putting your money in a savings account, only at a much higher interest rate than banks can offer you.

Is arbing really risk-free?

Unfortunately, there are risks. In any betting scheme, there are always things that could go wrong, Odds can change very quickly, and you must be nimble on your feet to keep up with it all. Arbing isn’t something you can do and sit back from.

However, you must be disciplined in your approach and resist any outliers however tempting they might seem. But, with care, there are excellent and reliable profits to be made. Sports arbitrage works. Just look at those who have made significant profits using it – for a time at least.

Best Software for Sports Arbing

There are quite a few arbing products out there, with probably the best of the bunch if you are serious about your arbitrage being Rebel Betting. They have a large number of bookmakers and sports available and include dutching opportunities which is a useful feature allowing you to go a bit more under the bookies’ radar than straight arbs. It is generally used by the professionals. 

If you are looking for something more straightforward (and cheaper) then Oddsmonkey has an odds comparison tool which can be used to find arbs.

The most significant danger is your bookmaker

The most significant threat, though, is your bookmaker. Bookmakers hate successful arbing, as it robs them of their profits. If you are making substantial profits arbing, then they are likely to severely restrict or close your account. You will have allowed them to do so by signing up to their terms and conditions.

Naturally, you never read them, who does? You had no choice but to accept them. But they will state that your account may be closed at the discretion of the bookmaker at any time and there is no right of appeal. Even if you do protest, it would be unusual for them to overturn their decision.

How do bookmakers know you have been arbing?

An important rule is to never underestimate bookmakers. There are good reasons why you rarely see a poor one. They are very smart organisations run by bright people and can quickly spot the tell-tale signs that identify potential arbitrage betters. If you are arbing, here are some tips to hide your trail.

• – Don’t sign up with a new bookmaker, make a large deposit, and make a maximum bet on a selection. This is certain to raise suspicions.
• – Don’t stake strange amounts. Your arbitrage strategy/algorithm might indicate an optimum bet is £18.42, but if you bet that amount it is clearly identifiable as an unusual bet, especially if you bet strange amounts frequently. At least make your bets look usual by rounding them up or down.
• – Be careful about frequently placing bets at high odds. This is a typical arbitrage pattern that bookmakers look out for.
• – If you can, also do some “mug bets” from time to time to throw the bookies off your scent and make them think you are an amateur punter. Nothing says mug more than throwing in a few accas here and there. Of course if you wanted to reduce the risk of said mug bets you could also lay them off at the exchanges. 
• – It would also help to follow these steps to try and keep your bookie accounts open. 

What About Exchange Arbing?

One possibility that gets around the risk of bookie restrictions is to arb between exchanges like Betfair, Smarkets, Betdaq and Matchbook. They have no problem with arbers because all they are interested in is bets being matched, regardless of whether you are making a profit by arbing, matched betting or doing anything similar. 

If you watch the exchanges closely enough you may spot the odd arbing opportunity, but it must be said they are few and far between and usually disappear pretty quickly. 

That may be because bots are operating arbing strategies between exchanges and are hoovering up any opportunities as they arise. Such bots are quite commonplace in the (largely unregulated) crypto markets, although most we have seen are of dubious quality. We haven’t seen any available for the exchange markets, but if anyone would like to develop one we would be all ears!

Of course if you are going to arb between exchanges, don’t forget to factor commission into your calculations. 

So, what’s our conclusion?

As we said at the start, we will leave you to draw your own conclusions. But we must point out that many professionals and amateurs alike make healthy profits from arbing – for a time anyway. There is nothing illegal about it. Just make sure you have the right tools and take as many steps as you can to try and keep your bookie accounts open for as long as possible.

Inevitably if you are going to arb the bookies will close your accounts, it’s just a question of when. In our view, matched betting through a service like Profit Maximiser is probably a better option, as you can generally keep your bookie accounts open for longer and make more money from it. 

For those outside of the UK and Ireland who don’t have access to free bets and bonuses in order to do matched betting however, arbing is another low-risk option to make money from the bookies.