Create The Perfect Soccer Accumulator Bet
When I worked at a large high street bookmaker five years ago there was an interesting story that filtered through the shop network. A gentleman had gone into a shop in Scotland, one of the old shops that had a photocopied part of the betting slip the customer kept and placed a football bet. The punter returned after the apparently successful football betting wager and asked to collect his bet. The bet was a twenty six match accumulator bet with a £10 stake.
The betting shop manager, having not noticed such a winning bet when he settled the bets and sure that if such a win had occurred he would have known about it checked back through his betting slips and found that the gentleman had doctored the slip. Because this is fraudulent, no payout was given and the customer banned. Curiosity got the better of the shop manager and he attempted to settle the bet to see what the customer attempted to collect. He gave up after the winnings amounted to more than the amount of money that circulates in the United Kingdom, as the punter had selected second favourites!
Many readers will say this is the perfect accumulator, but I disagree. The perfect accumulator is one that is filled with value bets. If you place a £10 bet on five teams each at even money to win (2.00), your total returns including your stake will be £160. For a football betting fan like myself who prides themselves with an ability to spot a bit of value in the market I look for selections with value so I get the maximum return from my bet. I assess the games and then look at the four or five best selections and place my bet. When my bets win the returns are usually upwards of £100 to a £10 stake. My pursuit of value bets mean that I believe I am getting better than 11.00 on the total bet to win, meaning if I placed the same bet over and over I will profit long term.
Most football betting fans place accumulators of between six to eight bets and most of them have, for example, Manchester Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool in the bet. When I had to manually settle the football bets on a Saturday when I worked as a shop manager if any of the above teams had been defeated most of the customers betting slips were losers. A bad day for the top teams were (and still are I imagine) always a good day for the bookmakers! Most of the favourite teams prices were only 1.30 – 1.50. Was this value to the customers? Probably not, but they still placed them in their bets each and every week. My betting consists of between three to five value bets at between 1.70 – 2.50 usually. I will only bet on a football team at better odds than 2.00 only when they are heavy favourites playing away from home.
Teams that play away from home are normally given better odds because it is well known that playing away makes it harder to win. Statistics over many football seasons shows that when playing away nearly every team has a worse away record than their home record. I have found, however, that the really strong teams still tend to do well away from home; they need to in order to remain at the top of the league. I jump on the value offered by the away odds at around even money and regularly bet on the away teams to win.
As Football betting is only a long term profitable enterprise by consistently betting on value, your accumulators need to be considered in the same way. Selecting numerous favourites without checking the bets are likely to cause you to lose in the long team. It only takes one rogue result to break an accumulator, so I keep the selections to a maximum of five or six. My treble bet from this weeks series of soccer tips give a good return of around ten times my stake for three games I found value in. I look forward to finding more perfect accumulators in the future that give me plenty of value and plenty of winnings to collect!
By Malcolm Clarke
