Thought I would share my journey to 1000 bets with the community, so here goes…
So I started with a pretty small bankroll of £500, to test the water, and figured I would try and speed up my profitability by getting loads of bets down as quickly as possible…
After 2 weeks I managed to hit 1000 bets. It’s not sustainable (for me at least) to be putting this many bets down each day, but I think 30-40 a day on average will be…
After around 200 bets:
I was £200 up vs CLV profit of around £60, with an ave bet of only £6. So a great start. Then the wheels fell off, as I kind of expected them to since I was running so far above expected profit.
From 200-800 bets
This was really hard: for around 10 days I descended slowly back down, underneath the expected profit line and maybe naively expected to level out soon after. But instead, the descent continued and by the time I hit around 800 bets, I bottomed out and briefly dipped below zero, at a point where my CLV profit was around £240. Psychologically, it took its toll - it’s a lot of effort putting this many bets on and when you realise you would have been more profitable if you had just bet the opposite each time, it can really piss you off! And I stupidly started following some of the matches as they were happening, willing my luck to change. Total waste of time, but hard to resist…Anyway, I tried to put my faith in the logic of the system and accept this was normal variance. But it wasn’t easy, and I didn’t like the way it affected my mood…
800-1000
Finally, it looks like I’ve turned the corner, and I’m back up to around £100 up, vs CLV profit of £260. I’m trying to see the difference between the two as credit in the bank that I will get at some point.
Some other random thoughts:
I realised that if I put around 40 bets on per day, and ave odds around 2.0 or slightly over, over time I would expect around 21 wins to 19 losses for each 40 bets. It’s a narrow margin, and easy to see how on a day to day basis you can have long runs that go in either direction.
Bookmakers:
I have used 10Bet, BWin, William Hill, Betfair and SMarkets, and lately Unibet.
WH has already started restricting my bets, though I haven’t worked out the pattern yet, as sometimes they allow me to place the full amount, sometimes hardly anything. I wasn’t at all careful with my bet selection, just bet on anything and everything I could.
I’ve been a bit (not much!) more careful with BWin and 10Bet, pretty much focusing on basketball and NFL. No sign of being limited yet (currently up with BWin, similarly to WH, but down with 10Bet).
I also have 888, but haven’t seen a single value bet with them yet…
Would be really helpful to see CLV by bookmaker, esp. for the Exchanges, as I would like to see if long term it is sustainable to be doing this with Betfair and SMarkets.