The Footy Trader

Manchester United totally wiped out Chelsea and Scolari is not too pleased with that, unsurprisingly. I didn’t expect there to be such a comprehensive thrash type scoreline at 3 – 0 but I have been expecting Man U to be heading upwards in the league because of having two games in hand on the other teams in the top four.

As for my trading at the weekend, I did do some trading on the under 2.5 goals with the Villa game and then I missed the start of the later games. I think I will have to start setting a reminder on my iPhone of when the games are due to start so that I can get in there in a timely fashion. I didn’t even do anything with the lay the loser strategy, as I was looking at the Stoke Liverpool game and there was no score to do anything with. In the Villa game after the first goal I could have done the lay the loser but the lay odds were way too high. I may consider looking at the possibility of doing a dutch of the win and the draw instead it may be more controllable.

OK so now I will go and look at the fixtures list for this week and start making some calendar appointments that will wake me up in time for when the game is due.

I would be pleased to hear from you if you have any ideas for betting strategy on football games. Tell us what is working for you or even what is not working. Is anyone still working on the Football Cash Generator and how are you doing with it?

Liverpool deserved a draw from the game at home to Athletico Madrid  although Madrid were very unlucky to go home with a draw. Work that one out. Great game to watch and Liverpool were playing well but couldn’t get the ball in the back of the net. At the finish on 95 minutes Liverpool were awarded a dubious penalty and Steven Gerrard put it away.

Sometimes you have to think that footy is a weird game, but then that’s what makes it so compelling to watch and enjoy. You never know what is going to happen next.

Chelsea losing in Roma was a shocker too when you consider the form they are playing with lately. A couple of 5 – 0 wins lately in the Premiership.

Chelsea battled hard against Liverpool in the semi final and took there luck  to get to the final. I would have liked to have seen the game on the TV but no joy here. I didn’t even get to trade on the game as I was late getting to look at the game in BinarySoft BDI. The match was already 25 minutes old and the odds would not have given value.

Good job I didn’t try it on Betfair, seeing as there was a goal at 33 minutes and that would have caught me out in my favoured under 2.5 goals market.

Don’t forget that BetAngel is a professional type betting software that does everything apart from make the tea. Excellent if you want to be the bookmaker of link up with an excel spreadsheet. I wish there was a Mac version….

Great for English football to see two English clubs in the Champions League final

Tags: ManchesterUnited, Chelsea, Liverpool, binarysoft, under 2.5 goals market. Betfair, gambling, trading

I am only home for a short while for lunch and after eating the game at Stamford Bridge was already under way. I would have had a larger back bet on the unders at the start but the odds were not great to start with and then when I looked again the match had 25 minutes played. I just went in with a small back bet and I traded out quickly. The price was moving well enough but the best times to trade are at the beginning of a game or just after a goal as thats when there is most movement in the right direction. Although if the odds are above 1.90 at the beginning all the better.

I didn’t even get a half a percent profit due to the low stake but I am not too bothered, it’s a nice sunny day here in Spain and I was sitting on the terrace relaxing, seemed a shame to run inside to the computer. Even when I could be making some money.

The Birmingham City game vs Liverpool looked better for the starting price on the under 2.5 goals market, but I will be back at work when that game starts.

I still have my bet running on Rangers, I have not traded out yet. I could have had a small profit at the end of the match on Thursday but not enogh to tempt me away from the forty five I have guaranteed on the game if I wait.

I got the game 5 minutes late but thought I would give it a go anyway and wouldn’t you know it the market suspended before the price had a chance to move much. Decided to put in another buy at the new odds so that I would move to a profit quicker so long as no more goals went in. I just left it then and was able to trade out about 15 20 mins later to a small profit. The second goal went in at sixty minutes and I have just spotted that Liverpool have scored again. Gerards complaints about how well they have been playing lately seems to have had a positive effect on the team.

I used BinarySoft for trading today. I only have a small betting bank so I started with a 0.2 size of a back or buy to start the position on the under 2.5 goals and I put in the same again just after the first goal. It didn’t take too long to be able to trade out for a small profit despite the goal going in at 12 minutes. I would have preferred to have got in at the start of the game and take the couple of ticks movement an be greened up at 10 minutes.

As I was writing this another goal went in, this time one for Bolton, but it will be a little late with only 10 minutes left to the end of the game.

I set up some dutches for the correct scores using BetIE yesterday and got it right with all eight games that were being played I put 100 euro on each bet and the profit at the end of the was 208 euro. From my spreadsheet I have set up to record these type of bets I have profit of 561 euro from 25 games.

To set up those types of dutching bets you have to use BetIE or the BetAngel Professional You can also do the dutching in Soccer Mystic. But I didn’t have Windows running on my Mac and didn’t want to start it either so I stayed with BinarySoft which was great for what I was doing.

Might trade on the Everton Portsmouth game which starts in half an hour too.

By the way I am not pleased with Betfair regards the way they want to charge more if you have more than 20 data request per second. It will mean that I will perhaps only be able to run one piece of software at one time so as not to get charged more, or I will have to limit the number of markets monitored in BinarySoft.

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The Newcastle vs Manchester United game was going to be a bit of a battle. But I messed up totally. I came to it late, the game was already running for 20 minutes and the first goal went in just after I placed my first back bet. I traded out to a loss on that then moved to the under 3.5 and late to the under 4.5 goals and I have had similar luck with all of them. The minimum loss was 0.45 and the largest was 32 on the under 4.5. I had just put in a back bet at about 77 minutes and Newcastle scored a goal. I would have traded out right after that because the back bet was bigger than I wanted to go with but Manchester scored again within a minute and blew the whole thing for me.

Must have been a wild game judging by the number of yellow cards given to the Newcastle players. Maybe I will get to see the game on Match of the Day this evening.

So it has not been a good day today and I should not have tried trading when I was still having to do things to finish off the party at the house. I just wiped out the free bets I got from Bwin and also the unders trading from the last week.

I will get more money in this week from some matched betting anyway, once I have sorted out the problem with the bank and the Cyber targeta.

I hope you all had a better time trading with BetAngel BetIE or BinarySoft than I did.

First of all to mention that the 80/20 tips came through on the last race at Wolverhampton. The horse Nigella got placed and took the profit to €29.96 which is 1.34 points up with 20 euro stakes.

Not so good with the tips from Racing Place for the day with it being minus €42.52 and thats minus 2.12 points of the betting bank. The total at the end of the day was still €104 in front. Good job it started with a very good days’ results on the first day. So far today with half of the days’ results in for Saturday it is down some more at €60 for the total. Still could turn around as there are plenty more races to come.

The 80/20 tips for the day are doing better though, the total is up to €85 so there is approximately an increase of €60 so far. I will update at the end of the day.

Football trading

I have a trade going at the moment on the Liverpool vs Barnsley game. Before Liverpool scored I put one on the match odds for them to win. I was trying out the Liability mode in BinarySoft and after the goal I clicked on the lay side to try and green up with out changing any settings. It got totally messed up and I and trying to rectify the matter now. It got to half time without any more goals. Liverpool should win the game but I would still prefer to trade out and have the profit locked in. To try and rectify the matter I put in another back bet on Liverpool but the odds didn’t move at all in the last 10 mins of the first half. When it starts again probably something will move and if Liverpool can get another all the better.

Update……

Anything can happen in the FA Cup and it was such a good idea to trade out of the early bet I had on Liverpool. Not long after I traded out Barnsley equalised and would you believe it but they actually won the game with a 90 minute goal leaving Liverpool no chance to reply. I lost 44 cents on that first bet but I made 52 cents on trading of the under 3.5 goals market.

I then traded on the Man United game and you can imagine what a disaster that was. I made most of the target 1%  on the under 2.5 goals and changed to the under 3.5 goals when I got caught with a goal and not being greened up. I traded out of that to a loss of €5. I went then to the under 4.5 goals to make up some of that and then traded on the Barcelona game at Zaragoza. I was left with a minus for the day but it was small enough and manageable,  minus 2%. It could have been worse, handy that I was able to make it up with some further trading.

After my disappointments with the interface of Soccer Mystic yesterday , I thought I should actually read the user guide. It is good to try out software without doing that first because you get a better idea of how intuitive it is, and mostly it worked well enough. I didn’t need to have the Confirm Bets checkbox checked to make sure that the software didn’t lose me some of my betting bank when I clicked on something I wasn’t sure about. It is all pretty straight forward.

While reading the user guide I found myself thinking ‘Wow thats cool’ a few times and being impressed with the tricks it has up its sleeve to help me make money. Some of the things were a different way to do something I can do already in another part of the software, but with the control over what happens being set differently. For example in the Bookmaker tab (which only places lay bets) I can set how much I want to stake, how much I want to have as profit or just go by the minimum bet amount and then by using the Margin Maker checkbox on the unders side of the market, see what odds I need to have the lay bet go in at to make the money. It is similar to making a back bet on the unders then laying off as the price comes down when no goals are scored at the start of a match. The difference being that the back bet part of the trade is replaced by making a lay bet on the overs side.

impressed with the tricks Soccer Mystic has up its sleeve

I also tested out the Make Market button on the One Click tab. This can be used in the time leading up to the start of a game when there is not much movement in the prices. I clicked the button when the back price was 2.12 and the lay price was 2.14. Soccer Mystic then places bets on the wrong side of the market as it were. So orders went in for a back bet of 2.14 and a lay bet of 2.12. When both of these orders are filled there will be a profit due to the spread between the prices asked for in the order. I did it with the Spurs vs Arsenal game about 20 hours before the game was due to get under way, and left it overnight. In the morning both of the bets had been matched and there was a small profit from the minimum size bets Soccer Mystic had placed for me. The only thing is that you don’t have any control over which bet gets matched first and you might need a plan in case one of them doesn’t get matched when the game goes to in play. I expect though that doing this well before a game is due to start there would be only a small risk that it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to.

Another area of interest is the correct scores or even the match odds for dutching. With the correct scores there are certain scores that happen more regularly than others, so by making a bet that covers those scorelines you can have a good chance to make money. I think I would prefer to test that theory though by seeing how many times I need to win that type of bet compared to how often it loses and what effect that has on the betting bank. The strategy can be enhanced though by covering a correct score possibility that is unlikely to pay back smaller or not at all if it happens. The effect of this is that you get a better percentage profit overall while having a smaller risk. There are about 7 scorelines that happen more than others. I will give you more about that in another posting.

Soccer Mystic can also be connected to Excel the spreadsheet to make automated bets if you know how to do that in Excel. I don’t know enough about that to comment right now but will perhaps look at later.

The ability to have the stake size determined by the price you want to make per tick is useful too. This is because of the tick sizes not being equal. In the table you can see that the smaller odds have smaller sizes in terms of movement too. So if you want the same amount of profit per tick at the smaller odds you will have to increase the amount of the bet. With this you can make the same amount of money under the odds of 2.0 as you do with the odds between 2.02 and 3.00

I didn’t expect this in Soccer Mystic as I thought I would only find this in the BinarySoft program.

Looking forward to this evening and the game between Spurs and Arsenal and increasing my betting bank some more.

Couldn’t get the Price Predictor working again today with Soccer Mystic. Still think it is something to do with the time zone thing. Despite that, I made a 3.5% gain on the betting bank by trading on the unders 2.5, 3.5 and even the under 4.5 goals. The first in and out trades on under 2.5 went well and I was on target for profit by 15 mins into the game. Then I went for one more dip and of course a goal went in. When the market reformed I put in the same amount again and then waited until I was in profit again. I saw a similar amount of profit on that market as I had initially and I was out of the market when another goal went in. I had a total of 14 trades before the under 2.5 goals was settled.

I decided to move to the under 3.5 goals market and had eight back and lay trades and I was out of it while it was still safe and I had by then moved to the 4.5 goals arena. I just did a small trade on that and perhaps could have let it run but with the game at 2 -2 I went for caution and traded out before end of the game.

I was still more comfortable with BetAngel than with Soccer Mystic, maybe if I had got the Price Predictor working I would have been happier. I still think that there ends up too many windows especially if you are working with multiple markets and even though I dare say you would get used to it if using the software on a long term basis, I don’t like the clutter. Tabs would be better, although there are quite a few tabs in the windows that present themselves anyway. Maybe I would be less annoyed if I was just using one or the other rather than trying out BetAngel and also Soccer Mystic at the same time.

OK – Just looking at what we have in Soccer Mystic in the first of the windows, the one where you select the markets you want to work with. There are tabs for Odds, Unmatched Bets, Matched Bets, Log and Soccer Desktop (the browser which shows you the Soccer Mystic web site)

So I choose the game and click on the button for trade and another window comes up with a new load of tabs – One Click, Ladder, Manual Bet, Dutching, Bookmaking, Matched bets, Saved bets, Excel, Log and Rules. I decide to use the ladder because that’s the best to use with trading and I need to see more of the ladder so I expand the tab so I show more of it. Guess what – Yep thats right – Another window to fill my screen.

I arrange the windows so that the ladder is on top and the trade window underneath with the matched bets showing . That way I can see what was the latest bet to be matched . Would be better to have that info in the ladder window as it is in BetAngel. Good that you can choose how many rows of ladder you want, might as well show as many as you can fit in vertically to get the most information. Good to have access to the charts with the button but I still like the BetAngel charts on the enhanced ladder view.

There is only one green up button on the ladder tab for each side of the market of the unders, one for under and one for over. I prefer the extra options in BetAngel and I like to use the manual close button on BetAngel that lets me work out what odds I want to aim for to get whatever profit is there. Or see how far the odds have to come down if I put in the last back bet just before a goal was scored and I need to wait to be able to trade out.

Update:- I see that there is a Trade Calculator in Soccer Mystic that does the same as I was able to do in BetAngel. Just need to have it pop another window to get it working……

I have not worked out the Make Market button on the One-Click tab yet. I will look in the users guide soon – I promise. I know I am complaining a lot about the software but I feel sure that if Peter at BetAngel is reading the blog he might have a think about the feedback here and make it better for all users. I know Soccer Mystic will get better over time anyway. My blog is not to sell the software blindly to my readers but to inform about the pros and cons as I see them. I reckon that if I wax lyrical without mentioning the parts I am not so keen on then the blog becomes less credible.

As it stands with the Soccer Mystic right now, I recommend taking advantage of the trial offer for the 30 days and see how it fits your trading style on Betfair and decide for yourself whether to keep with it.

Good Luck from Wizardgold – Will be working with Spur Arsenal game tomorrow

I looked at the Chelsea game to see what I could do with it. The plan was to put in the back bet in at the start of the game for 90 Euro and then lay off a third at 5 minutes and another 3rd at 10 minutes then green up at 15 minutes. The odds were slow to come down I thought but I still had it with 6 Euro profit on the unders when all the laying off was done. I put in an extra lay bet on the unders to leave it at about €3.80 on either side under and over. I did this with BetIE and in learning mode.

I also looked at the European games on but the liquidity was low on those games and I was not impressed the way the odds were moving. I did one of the games with 100 on and greened up at 15 or 20 minutes leaving a profit of 7 Euro. It was Bayern (Germany) vs Aris (greek) in which the final score was 6 – nil. The first goal didn’t go in until 25 minutes so it worked out prety good.

I wanted to make a video today of the  but I left it too late, the 20 day trial was up unfortunately. I will set it up when I put in some more money into Betfair at the beginning of January. In the meantime I have been looking at the stats for the first goal in Premiership games. Using the Soccerstats.com site I put data into a spreadsheet for the first 17 rounds of the season. This is what I have come up with….

At 5 minutes 93% of games are still nil – nil
At 10 minutes 82% are still nil – nil
At 15 minutes 68% are still nil – nil
At 20 minutes 61% are still nil – nil
At 25 minutes 56% are still nil – nil

So you can see that trading in the first five minutes should be great for making money. Only 7% of the games have a goal and that doesn’t mean that the back bet placed at the start of the game is lost. Unless there is a very quick equaliser it is possible still to trade out after a couple of minutes and reduce the possible loss. Or you can place a bigger back bet after that goal and trade out as quick as you can after that to bring it even or perhaps make a profit. It needs a larger back bet maybe 3 or 4 times the original so that you are making more per tick of movement after the market reformed. Or you could leave the initial trade running and be able to trade out when the odds get back to where you started.
It all depends on the game and some knowledge of the teams would be useful too.

My next move is to watch how the odds move in the next couple of rounds of the Premiership and see what sort of movement I can expect and the money I should win when things go right compared to the money that could be lost when the goals come thick and fast. I want to know if there is an optimum level of odds for the first back bet – how fast do the odds change and how many ticks the market moves on average at the start of a game and also after a goal has been scored. I will want to see what number of ticks it is usual for the market to move to when the goal has gone in. So that if I trade out straight away what level of loss will I lock in.

I am determined to use the stats to see if I have enough of an edge to make money from this strategy. Is it best to let all games go 15 minutes and green up or is it best to lay off in 5 minute intervals. Instinct makes me think that laying off gradually is going to be a best option as the first goal gets more likely as the minutes tick by. I think that the stats will give me the best strategy for making money with this market in Betfair. I expect that the gradual lay off and a re-entry into the market after a goal is scored to make some extra trading a few ticks and maybe to add a little more at the end of a game when there is still a nil nil scoreline. There is also the under 3.5 goal market to turn to on some games which could sweeten the pot a little also.

The other statistic worth noting is that so far the percentage of goals at the final whistle that are under 2.5 goals is 53% and in combination with making sure that I have a back bet at a value price then the under 2.5 goal market will be lucrative enough.