Millions of people around the world gamble on football every year. Whether it’s a 10-fold accumulator with super long odds or a tenner on your team to win, the difference between going with your head or your heart can have a big effect on how successful you are. Football is notoriously difficult to predict as even the most unrealistic results can and often do happen. Just look at Leicester’s incredible league win last year or the cup upset suffered by England at the hands of Iceland during the European championships. The real question is whether you should go with a hunch, or look at the history books to make your choices.
Going with your gut feeling is often a trusted method of making decisions in various aspects of life. When it comes to choosing a partner, trusting a stranger or hiring a new employee, ‘giving something a chance’ is often a more successful strategy than looking at the nitty-gritty data. However, statistics and data can often paint a clear prediction of what will happen based on historical outcomes. This is where it becomes difficult when picking your bets and hardly anyone used either data or gut feeling to back Leicester to lift the Premier League trophy.
A good starting point when making an informed bet is to take your emotions out of it. Everyone wants to see their favourite player score a hat-trick or for their team to beat the team two tiers above them, but this only makes matters worse. Some go as far as never betting on their own team to avoid any clouded judgement.
Following the form book may seem like a good way to ensure consistent wins throughout the season. The reality with football is that there are so many factors in play that the ‘weird results’ aren’t that weird at all. When England and Iceland met in the summer, England were heavy favourites to beat Iceland by a considerable margin, thanks to big name stars and a higher ranking. However, Iceland were on the back of a streak of confidence that saw them draw against Portugal, the eventual winner. England had a rocky start to the tournament and didn’t look convincing in their first few games, made worse by a noxious mix of low confidence and intense media pressure. Not many people took these factors into consideration and probably saw an England win as a safe bet, due to history and statistics. Make sure you aren’t fooled into mindlessly choosing the favourite, when in reality both teams were closer matches than anyone thought.
The key to maintaining betting form is to use both gut instinct and the facts and figures to make your choices. People that simply pour over stats and previous results will actually be less likely to get it right and the same applies to those who go with a hunch each time.
Make sure you keep track of the best offers and apply your money wisely when predicting. If you have a justification for why you think that result will happen, you should start to see results.