Sports Arbitrage Betting Questions and Answers - How do I avoid deposit fees?

Steps to successful betting – Part 1

Step 1 - Be professional

When ever you are placing a bet with a bookmaker (and increasingly so with exchanges) you are betting against professionals. To stand a chance of beating them you need to be as professional in your approach as they are. There are many ways you can become more professional in the way you bet, here are some good starting points:

Research – Don’t just place random bets on whatever takes your fancy. Take the time to research your selected market. Ask yourself, is it a market you are familiar with and do you understand it?
Keep records and notes. The majority of punters do not do this because it requires time and effort. Record keeping allows you to easily pin point what went well and what went wrong with your betting strategy. You may think that you will remember both the good and bad points of the bets that you make. However if you take the time to document what you are doing you will find that your personal notes will become invaluable in guiding and focusing your betting decisions. Taking the time to keep a log of what you are doing immediately gives you a head start against the general betting public.
Be disciplined. This is the hardest personality trait to develop; it goes against human nature to adopt a disciplined approach. Whenever we lose a bet, the first thing we want to do is win the money back, it is not easy to have faith in what you are doing when you hit a losing streak, as everybody does.

Step 2 – Learn how to lose

This is one of the most important rules. Learn how to lose. The successful punter needs to accept losses as part of the territory. Your emotional reaction to losses will define your success.

Step 3 - Expecting to win

Communication is only 30% verbal. What has this got to do with betting I hear you ask? The point I am trying to make is that the way you are thinking effects the way you act physically. If before your next bet you are constantly worrying about the selection losing, this will affect your behaviour. For example you may decide to lower your stake, change your selection and go with your gut feeling rather than your strategy or simply decide against betting at all. If you are constantly worrying about the worst that can happen, then guess what? It probably will.

Fortunately the opposite is also true. This doesn’t mean becoming blindly positive about everything regardless of the circumstances. What it means is that if you do your research, keep to your strategy and make the right selections you will become confident in yourself and what it is that you are doing. Confidence in turn breeds success.

Step 4 - Risk management

Successful gambling is akin to successful investing in many ways. Risk management is an integral part of this.

Minimum risk, maximum return.

Never place your bets from the perspective of what you want to win, but always from what you can afford to lose. It’s a cliché, but its true.

Step 5 - Managing your bank

This is closely linked to step 4. Safeguarding your bank or betting cash pool is paramount. This will involve analysing the down side and calculating how many losing bets your bank will survive on a losing streak. As a rule of thumb, your betting bank should have enough money in it to be able to suffer a continuous loss of 100 units, e.g. for a £100 bank, your bet size should be around the £1 mark. There can be some flexibility in this depending on the opportunity, but generally speaking the maximum bet should never be more than 2% to 3% of the bank, with 1% being an ideal figure.

Betting 10% of your bank on each bet is a quick way to the poorhouse.