As 2016 draws to a close, it is time to complete our series looking at the best betting products of the year.

In our previous categories, Profit Maximiser picked up the title of Best Betting System and Flat Racing Master picked up the title of Best Horse Racing Tipster.

Well today it is the turn of the football tipsters and systems to see who picks up the award of best one of 2016.

Football is the most gambled-on sport in the world and there is no shortage of tipsters out there trying their hand at making a profit from the game.

So it has been quite an effort to sort through them all and find the best ones.

But we are pleased to say we have managed to do so and have whittled the list down to our top three.

Top Three Football Tipsters/Systems 2016

It has been an interesting year for football betting products, with a number of new concepts being devised and some good ones emerging.

3. Betfair Renegade

At number three on our list is Betfair Renegade, a piece of software that comes free with Profit Maximiser – but on a limited basis only as the owner, Mike Cruickshank, only sells it at certain times. What the software does is find instances where the Betfair odds are too high in particular football matches, indicating there is value. Under a live six-month trial here on the site, Betfair Renegade made over 230 points profit at an excellent return on investment of 14%. And the best thing about it is that all the bets can be placed at Betfair – so no worries about having those bookie accounts closed!

2. Football Trading Alerts

At number two on our list is Football Trading Alerts, which is a trading system for Betfair using in-play stats to identify value live betting opportunities. It made over £620 profit to just £35 stakes during our trial, achieving a strike rate of 60%. Going back further, the results on their website show profits of over £4,000 since starting in January 2015, so these alerts certainly seem to have an edge on the market. A clever, but simple, betting strategy that has proved its worth and well deserving of the number two spot on our list.

1. Pro Footy Tips

At the number one spot is Pro Footy Tips, a football tipster who has achieved outstanding results in 2016, despite only starting tipping in March. With over 180 points profit made in the year from March, members following Pro Footy Tips will have done very well indeed. Having been a professional gambler for over two decades, the chap who runs the service tends to bet “against the crowd,” picking odds-against shots and those not-so-obvious selections. It is clearly an approach that works very well, with a return on investment very close to 25% so far. Kudos to Pro Footy Tips for picking up the number one spot in our Best Football Betting Product of 2016.

So there you have it, that wraps up our Betting Awards for 2016.

It only remains for me, Dan, to say thanks very much for following Honest Betting Reviews this year and I hope you have found the reviews interesting – and that they have helped you make a few quid/Euros/dollars in the process.

Have a great New Year’s Eve and see you in 2017!

As 2016 draws to a close and we all head off to celebrate Christmas, we have been looking back on the year here at Honest Betting Reviews and picking out the highlights for us from a betting point of view.

Thinking firstly about our number one betting system of the year, the accolade once again has to go to Profit Maximiser from Mike Cruickshank.

This has been our number one system since we reviewed it over a year ago and nothing has been able to dislodge it at the top of our list.

Well once again Profit Maximiser proved its worth recently, with two members landing massive casino wins of £205,500 and £58,839.60 each.

That’s a whopping £264,339.60 in total. Not bad little bonuses for Christmas!

It must be said that those two wins are out of the ordinary and not every member will have wins like those.

However, by following the instructions of Profit Maximiser properly and putting time into it, any member should be able to make around £500 per month risk free.

Profit Maximiser does this by taking advantage of all the bookies’ free bets and bonus offers and sets things up in such a way as to make these offers risk-free. 

During our three month trial of Profit Maximiser, we made £1732 from the introductory offers and £737 from the ongoing offers – so that’s £2,469 in total. 

Pretty awesome stuff!

Quite simply this is the best betting system we have tried so far. If you are going to try anything, I recommend this. 

The good news is there is an offer on at the moment that allows you to try Profit Maximiser for 14 days for just £1 to see if you like it.

If you decide it’s not for you, then you can just cancel before the end of the 14 days and no harm done.

We have tried countless betting systems and strategies over the years, many of which make ridiculous claims that they will make you rich and you will be able to “give up the day job” etc.

None of them have ever delivered on such promises.

That was until we came across Profit Maximiser however. It actually delivers what is says on the tin – continuing, risk-free profits of hundreds of pounds per month…or even more. 

When you think about it, this really is pretty incredible. Even the best tipsters will have losing runs.

What we have here though is a risk-free income for just a bit of work.

I spend just a couple of hours per week on Profit Maximiser and make at least £100 each week. That’s about £50 an hour – not bad work if you can get it!

So why not give it a go – the special offer of a 14 day trial for just £1 is available here.

Who knows, maybe after you’ve made your first grand from it you can buy me a pint!

[N.B. Please note that Profit Maximiser only really works in the UK and Ireland, as it relies on the bookies’ offers that are not so widely available elsewhere.]

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all our readers and we hope this yuletide period treats you well. 

We continue our series looking at great professional gamblers of past and present with a look at Billy Walters – who is estimated to have won £200 million gambling.

William “Billy” Walters has said that there is nothing he wouldn’t bet on. To prove it, he’s had a distinguished and varied gambling career for over three decades. Professional gamblers consider him the most successful gambler in the world. He has never had a losing year.

Gambling has made Billy a very rich man. He owns seven homes and his fortune is worth $200 million. But Billy’s life wasn’t always so glamorous or rich. Billy spent his childhood in Mumfordville, Kentucky. Raised by his grandmother, he lived in a house without indoor plumbing. He came by his gambling prowess naturally: his dad was a poker player and his uncle was a professional gambler. While other kids played basketball on the playground, Billy bet on the pro games. Billy lost bets but he never lost the love of the wager.

A Step Ahead of the Game – the Computer Group

In the 1980s he was selling cars in Kentucky but decided to become a bookie. That was an illegal enterprise in Kentucky so he moved to Vegas where gambling is the heart of the culture and the economy. This was at a time before the internet took shape but that didn’t stop Billy from becoming one of the first gamblers to use computers to formulate strategy around bets. He was part of a gambling group called the Computer Group. These innovative gamblers fed all the information they compiled from newspapers and other leads about gambling into a computer. They were so successful, the Vegas authorities thought they were running an illegal gaming operation.

Although Billy may have come by his gambling desire naturally in his DNA, we can trace his success to his love of research. One of his most successful gambling moments came about because he learned that the Golden Nugget Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, used an older roulette wheel than other establishments. That wheel had a bias toward paying off on certain numbers. Billy gambled on his research information and won millions from the Golden Nugget in 1986.

Public Information Only

Today, Billy bets so successfully on football and basketball that Vegas is afraid of his bets. He still relies on research but he has sports analysts who help him now with that chore. Despite rumors of insider information, he maintains that he relies on public information for his betting. It’s a pretty sure bet that a lot of the sports intelligence that would help with betting strategy (like injuries, etc.) is available online. He keeps all of his analysts/partners and associates separate. They do not know each other and he doesn’t place his bets personally.

Of course, Billy wouldn’t be much of an inveterate gambler if he limited himself to sports betting. He also bets at the casinos on craps and blackjack and at the horse races. He wins at all of those activities. He says he has a 57% winning ratio. He has, however, made his fortune on sports betting. His super bowl bets alone have garnered him $3.5 million. He also won as much as $4 million on a single casino weekend.

The Power to Move Markets

Walters’ betting sometimes has a big effect on the payoff spread of various games. If he doesn’t like the payoff on the favourite, he will bet on the underdog until the bookies change the spread. Then, he’ll tell his associates to place his bet on the favorite at the margin he wanted. That is a gambler’s gambler.

Billy is so successful at gaming that he has become security conscious as an important part of his business. People try very hard to learn how he does what he does. They want his system. They invade his privacy. So he runs his business from his home via computer network and phone network, using code names to shield his identity. There’s a price to pay for success even for a gambler.

So there you have it – one of the most successful gamblers of all time and certainly a gambler for all occasions – Billy Walters.

Fancy making some risk free profit? Well check out our review of Profit Accumulator to see how you can make as much as £500  per month risk free.

Following on from our article about Racetrack King Bill Benter, today we continue our series looking at the great figures of professional gambling with a look at Kerry Packer – Gambling’s Big Man. 

Australian Kerry Packer had an up and down life. He was born into one of Australia’s most wealthy and influential families, the scion of media barons. Yet he had severe problems with health, starting with polio and an iron lung in his youth and extending up to multiple heart attacks in later life. His relatively poor health was given as one reason for his relative estrangement from his father, who derided him for his poor health and anointed his brother the heir to the family media enterprise. When he died in 2006, though, Kerry Packer had certainly earned public respect. Australia held a state funeral at the Sydney Opera House.

Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer was among the world’s richest people. In 2004, his net worth equaled roughly $5.5 billion. Some of it he was born to. But much of it he earned through his own enterprise. At his death, notes the British newspaper The Guardian, he had “transformed a magazine and television business worth millions into a diversified enterprise worth billions, (and) became his country’s richest person.” He was instrumental in founding World Series Cricket, for example, broadcasting it to people worldwide. This financial interest was fueled by his love of sport. Packer was an avid sportsman, participating in cricket, rugby, and golf, among other games.

Packer’s up and down life wasn’t confined to oscillations between poor health and a wealthy family, however. His gambling wins and losses were legendary. At the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, for example, Packer at one point could count nearly A$33 million in winnings. Yet during another Las Vegas trip, he lost more than $27 million. Packer visited Britain on a nearly annual basis to play in professional gambling events, where he often won approximately $7 million. (Most of these winnings went to charities.)

And the up and down nature wasn’t confined to the U.S. or the U.K., certainly. He was an equally exuberant bettor on his home turf. According to one observer, Packer suffered huge losses in the late 1980s. During one race, the Golden Slipper at Rosehill, Packer bet $2 million on Christmas Tree, one of his horses. Christmas Tree lost, and so did Packer—a loss not confined to one horse, as his total losses equaled $7 million. But he won big as well. In the same period, he picked three winners in a row after betting $10 million.

Kerry Packer’s total bets on races are estimated to have sometimes neared $60 million. Over 3 days in the early 1990s, for example, he is rumored to have lost $55 million on races. It should be noted that these losses were amounts he could afford to lose given his vast wealth. Indeed, The Guardian characterised his investment behaviour as “like the many successful sportsmen he admired, he had a developed sense of timing, and knew when to get in and out of investments to maximise his return.”

The size of the bets affected not only his winnings but activities at the tracks themselves. He traveled with a large entourage, and they in turn were followed by many at the track, wanting some information or rumor of where Packer was placing his wagers. In the words of one observer, “Packer’s bets were so large that they would immediately make a horse unbackable, as the odds dropped steeply as the bookies attempted to balance their books.”

Stories of Packer’s outsize horse racing behavior abound. In one, he had his own horse, Major Drive in a 1980s race, yet bet another horse, Myocard. Myocard lost Packer $7 million—yet he still invited Major Drive’s jockey, Greg Hall, to his Australian home and shook his hand for winning.  In another, he paid a bookmaker $5 million rather than the $5.3 million owed, growling that he only dealt in round figures.

Though Australian television featured interviews with many of Packer’s business associates, friends and family on the complicated nature of the man, there are indications that he liked speed and racing in all things. His one-time daughter-in-law Johdi Meares, for example, is quoted as saying “Kerry and I were both revheads and we shared a passion for fast cars. Kerry liked everything fast, you know and he liked to take risk, I think he enjoyed the adrenaline.” Similarly, his friend Phillip Adams noted “Kerry had to have the fastest car in Australia. He had to have the biggest, the loudest, the longest, whatever, of anything. And he’d take me for these terrifying drives around Sydney, shouting joyously over the engine like Mr Toad.”