I started BettingTools.co.uk because I thought it would be great to have all the best betting websites easily accessible from one site. I had accumulated a list of really useful sites, tools and resources but it took me years to find some of them and I thought it would be particularly helpful for people new to betting to have in one handy directory.
Since then, I’ve created some of my own tools, spreadsheets, a tipster area, a blog for betting previews and a forum! All of this has helped my betting but I’ve also been so busy doing all this that I’ve kind of lost my way a bit in terms of measuring my progress with my betting.
I know that creating all of the above has helped my betting but by exactly how much and what my profit and loss is I couldn’t tell you. I’m definitely still down due to losses in the early years but again I’m not sure by how much. I know that my Betfair account is about 2k in the red and that I’m a few hundred up with Pinnacle. Most of the other bookies I will be in small profit because of all the free bets I took advantage of and since then my activity has been small compared with Betfair and Pinnacle.
So all in all I’d estimate that I’m about £1,000 down which is much better than it was and not bad for a hobby over the best part of a decade but it’s not the profit I originally set out for.
The plan now is to record all of my bets using a modified version of the bet records spreadsheet and to treat my betting as an investment. Stakes will be calculated accurately and be controlled and I will be able to see exactly how well I am (or not) doing and where I could improve.
I will only be using 3 bookmakers accounts for this to keep it manageable and these will be Betfair, Bet365 and Pinnacle Sports. I’ll do a further post on why these 3 later and why I believe they are the best 3 to help make a profit from betting.
I did try something similar to this before but I took on too many tipsters to do it with and it quickly became unmanageable. It was also using level stakes and with some of the tipsters I used tipping on longshots the losing streaks and profit/loss swings were hard to handle.
I have since had some success using BettingResource’s advised 10 unit staking system and will be using that for my betting investments now. It’s essentially an ad hoc Kelly Staking System but with less precision so that long shots don’t affect you so much.
It’s very difficult and time consuming to estimate and calculate as accurately as you need to with Kelly for so many bets as I will be making. Many of which I won’t actually know the edge because they’ll be tipped by tipsters.
I don’t want to get too bogged down by the staking so will try and have a set number of units for tipsters unless they’ve specified the units themselves. A max 10 unit stake will be just 3% of my available funds. The bets will be progressive and although I believe it’s advisable to wait until you’ve made 25% profit before recalculating stakes I’m going to be doing for each day or set of bets to hopefully grow the bank as fast as possible. I am only investing a little over £300 so we can afford to take on a little extra risk and a bit more volatility.
I shall be starting the investment with £364.24 across the 3 betting accounts. Which is what I happen to have in them currently. There’ll be no more deposits and no withdrawals. The link to the betting investment spreadsheet is here if you wish to follow or check in on my progress.
There are lots of useful sections in there that will automatically analyse by sport, by month, by tipster and look at in-play v pre-match, back v lays etc. Trades are difficult to input and will probably have to be done after the event but this should help me to a be more selective in play and b not trade out unless it’s value to do so!
I’ll be writing about several related topics on this subject over the next few days so look out for those and feel free to comment.
If anyone knows of any tipsters which my help my investment portfolio please let me know!