FoG

Everyone that knows me is sick to the back teeth of hearing about how I tipped Aguero for top scorer at the beginning of the season - made my money back on free bets - and  won the 6/1 payout on the Argentinian star. So this will be my last post on the matter. Did I get lucky, or was it a solid strategy. The big draw for me was the free bets. Paddy power were offering a €2 free bet for every goal scored. So lets take a look at what odds were on offer at the beginning of season. Top Scorer odds recorded from @paddypower on 15th Aug 2014 Of the top 5 preseason fancies some fared well, others not so good. Van Persie scored 10, Costa 20, Aguero 26, Sturridge 4 and Rooney 12. That is a total of 72 goals, or €144 in free bets. Read  here to see how to convert that €144 in free bets into up to about €115. To back all 5 strikers would have cost you €100 - so you are probably even or on a small profit just from the free bets before the winner is announced. When the...

I have had relative success taking advantage of the Bookie promotions.  For example I pocketed €100 in one month on the Free In-play bets on the Premier League.  I have also already won my stake back with Sergio Aguero and look set to pick up the big prize there too. So this promotion on the GAA has caught my attention. You have to stake €25 on the outright championship winner (you can bet each way).  You get a free €5 bet for each match they win. My strategy here is  1. Back Dublin to win Outright @ 11/8.  2. Back Kerry to win Outright each way @ 3/1.  3. For each free bet earned, back a 4/1 underdog. On the straight real bet, I don't have a positive expectation. There is a pretty big bookie edge built into this market with the implied probabilities adding up to 120%. So if you mark down the stakes by dividing by 120% - the estimated long term value from my €25 stake is a   €4.17 loss on each bet. Double that to give: expecte...

So you read my article here before and were wondering how the strategy panned out. I have posted the totals at the head of the below table, and continue scrolling for all the details. In 1 month I made a  € 100 total profit. Its not going to be enough to become a professional gambler, but I think most casual gamblers would be happy enough with that. In total I staked  €46 0 (23 bets @  € 20 each), on the real bets I came out at a loss of  € 32.54 which is 7% of the total staked. From The Happy Medium article we can see that on average betting on even money favourites I would expect to lose about 4% of my stake. So I lost a little more than expected but not too much more. This earned me  €23 0 in free bets and I won  €137.50 back. This is free money. This is roughly as expected. Most of our bets were at odds of on average about 5/2. The chart here indicates that we would expect to win back about 60c for every  € 1 at those odds in free bet...