I will write here some of my thoughts and results about value betting along this rocky path.
A quick introduction about me: I used to play poker professionally and I now have a “real” job so this is just a side hustle to me. However, having experienced some cruel, cruuel, cruuuel swings in poker makes it a lot easier for me to understand the swings involved in gambling. After 200 bets I’m down a 1000€ while the EV shows me about +1000€ and I am still happy to keep on putting some good bets in. (Miss Hanna: How can I see my EV in percentage and bunch of other numbers like I’ve seen others posting. I just see the graphs in “results”?)
I see many people here being obsessed with their settings and tweaking them until they see results but IMO they are just hurting themselves. Not betting on baseball or odds under 1,5 or doing something equally silly, is just silly The “better” results they see after having tweaked the settings are just dumb like aka variance.
What I like to concentrate is the following:
make a lot of bets
try to avoid having your bet amounts limited
–> profit
At the moment number 2 is still a priority to me. I try to optimize it with following things:
2.1 don’t bet on obscure games - no bets on Mongolian 2st division 1st half result AH +0.75 etc
2.2 Round your bets- I currently round them to the nearest 25€
2.3 fool around with other types of gambling on the sites. Because I still occasionally play poker that’s a natural thing for me, but I have also played some slots, or just made 10€ combo bets like the regular fish (casual player) would.
Most of my bets are on Bwin, Unibet (and PAF) but bet365 and NordicBet (especially for esports) are some of my favorites. William Hill looks good, but I am still in their retarded KYC process where 1. I sent them the documents 2. I sent a selfie with more documents 3. I now have to send a selfie with even more documents. I hope I will clean those ****ers ComeOn seems quite fast on changing their odds.
The settings:
min value 2%
min odds 1.1, max odds 99
time to start 120h
Those of you who don’t bet on such small odds I would like to ask this: do you think you know how Kelly works? Its way better to get x% of value on 1.2 compared to the same x% on 5.0 because you get to put in such a big portion of your bankroll.
I agree. For example, on overall i have made nice profit (600 euros) but on baseball im currently -230 euros. But i have only made like 80 bets on baseball so there is no reason to change anything. My odds range is 1.2-4.0, since i want to avoid variance by avoiding bigger odds.
You said about trying to avoid limitations, so have you tried any sharp bookmakers? Pinnacle, Exchanges, Brokers… I have made few bets on Betinasia now and i hope that i can really make some profit there, im going to try Sportmarket too. Im happy to take smaller value if i know that they dont limit & i can get bigger stakes in.
Also, if you are using the web version go to menu->reports and you will see better stats. I havent used the software version so i dont know about that. (Edit: Oh, you already probably knew that, so go to tracker section and on the right you see your number of bets and pending bets. On the right, click the arrow down.)
I have Pinnacle selected in the filters but I haven’t seen any value bets from them, which makes sense because they are probably the main sharp that rebelbetting uses to find the value bets. I’ve never tried any brokers and tbh I dont really know how they work but I gotta find out.
PAF+Unibet are good for betting on baseball and other main sports, but they limit the stakes a lot so I don’t bet on esports etc because its not worth it, and this way I probably get to put in more money in the long run.
Nordicbet works for esports really well and i’ve put in some 200€ bets with no problems.
One more tip to avoid getting limited is to deposit on credit cards, Trustly etc instead of web wallets which are something that sharks prefer to use. My friend who has worked as a country manager in several online casinos mentioned this to me.
Thanks for the tip about the arrow. I had totally missed that.
I agree. I have put a 10k bankroll with a 30% Kelly where the latter is quite swingy, but I don’t really mind these kinds of swings (that much). My poker swings used to be tens of times bigger.
I guess I should limit the upper end of the odds to 5 or smth because a) swings b) the higher odds historically on average have less value than small odds (check favourite-underdog bias). The same goes for over-under btw., and I tend to bet smaller than recommended on overs for that reason, if at all.d
PartyPoker has effectively blocked me now allowing me to bet max 1€ on any match, including the nights CL final. I think the mistake I made was to bet on Bosnia&Hertzegonina’s league and the Swedish 2nd div. Those were the last 2 normal sized bets I was able to make. In addition to those 2 bets I think the fact that I didnt play any poker there might’ve had an effect. I just DL’d the software but was too lazy to actually play there. I did however rake 10-20k€ last decade with that same account, but Im not sure if that matters much.
I will later create an account to Bwin with another email and try to be smarter with what I bet. Unless the companies will (illegally) exchange information about players and I have small limits from the start.
I think the only “safe” semi-soft bookies I know to safely bet those obscure games are Bet365 and SBO. I gotta find a thread about the bookies and contribute there along the road.
Unibet, PAF, ComeOn and others should now be reserved for major leagues. Hopefully NordicBet won’t ban me for betting on Thai basketball last night
300 bets done and its unfortunately been rather stale still. Today I got an exceptionally good bet in with Sheffield United -1,5 @1,962 on ComeOn (their closing line 1,4, Pinnacle 1,52) for 300€ where the value at the time of the bet was 13%+ (and later much more) , but the game was cancelled at half time for shitty weather or smth. At least I got my stake back but that bet might’ve put me on a watch list for ComeOn so I also made a somewhat random NHL parlay and played slots for a couple of euros.
William Hill is still the same. I send them what they want, they reply that they have yet to receive a proper document of that kind. They I ask what is wrong with the one I sent, and then they reply that I need to send the document.
I tried to open a couple of UK bookies but my credit cards dont allow deposits on gambling sites and Skrill wanted me to deposit to their italian bank account, but didnt provide me with enough details to actually do so, so the UK books are off the limits for a while.Last time I deposited to Skrill I did so with Trustly, but for some reason that wasnt available today…
Eventually I opened an account to BetHard where the account creation process and everything was very smooth, but unfortunately most of their odds are the same as in ComeOn which I didnt realize before for some reason. Anyway, its good to keep away from ComeOn for a while and “grind” BetHard’s 100€ deposit bonus while making value bets.
I will probably open one more non-UK bookmaker today/tomorrow to get more bets in.
Yeah your Avg Odds are pretty high but i dont think that -7% yield is even that bad with only 300 bets. Great if you can place that big stakes, you will also recover quick to EV with upswing. But i would limit max odds to 4-5.
Nordicbet has been great for me too, i even got 40€ free bet after weekend through some campaign. By the way, i took the Bethard 100€ bonus two weeks ago, i met the wagering requirements and got limited to max win 0,50€. So i withdraw my 600 euros and probably do that again with another account.
Also i have an experiment going with BetInAsia to see if you can get value from sharps. Currently on 80€ profit but with only 50 bets (on average maybe 30€ stakes).
Colefer_270:
Yes, and I would want it to be lower:
less variance
bigger and thus better bets
But I bet what I can from the bigger leagues and games. For example lately I’ve had several bets in NHL where the underdog has had odds of 3.2 - 4 which is quite insane given its the major sport with the most variance and the game where underdogs win 40% of the games (this stat is NOT exclusively for the playoffs). And some for esports where I have no clue what the game even looks like. (once I took a look of Dota 2 wtf )
Another thing: The avg odds might be high, but because Kelly works like it works, the money I put in with high odds is way lower than what I put in with lower odds.
I checked the last 100 bets quickly and I had only two bets with odds higher than 5 (8 and 10…) where I had invested a whopping 60€ in total out of maybe 8000€.
I don’t think its so much about the size of the bets, or the results, but about the bets you make. Of course the bookmakers want to get more turnover and thus make more profit, but they seem to be quite adept on effectively closing down accounts they see as sharks.
I also got a free 15€ from Bet365 which is quite funny because I think its by far the best bookmaker to make value bets with.
Sent some documents in their beloved selfie format to william effin hill, and here is their usual response:
Please take a picture of yourself holding these documents. Please ensure that all images are of high quality (clear), unobstructed and uncropped in JPEG format.
• A bank or credit card statement issued within the last 3 months that shows the registered address in your account. If you have deposited via an e-wallet please provide the statement showing the deposit to your e-wallet.
If somebody would tell me what to do I would really appreciate it. I have already done (several times) what they have asked me to do but their Maltese robots are still copy pasteing me the same responses.
Sites added:
SBO: a horrible user interface and I havent been able to find a search on their desktop, but at least there’s one on mobile. Took some time to get used to how they display their bets but its gettings better. Quick on changing their odds. Feels like they are more like an exchange than a traditional bookmaker…
Boylesport: I only deposited the minimum 5€ to see if they would immediately give me the same treatment as WH but they didnt. (I am very suspicious about the british bookmakers now) I will soon deposit some more and then quite soon try to do a withdrawal because the WH process made me insane. Past tense because they can keep their monies for all I care. I wont deal with them anymore.
Bethard has been very fast on changing their odds but even though ComeOn also uses the same odds service they on the other hand are a bit slower and i’ve been able to put some good bets in.
I have a trip coming up and my subscription is about to end as well so I will probably return to value betting later with another service which has coolbet. And to also compare which service gives me the best bang for my euros. (and I really dont mean the results)
500 bets down and results have been better as I’m only down 1100€ ATM. In other words in less than 100 bets I won 1100€.
I took a few days off while travelling which was probably good in many ways. Also I was finally able to put in a max bet of 500€ in a KHL match (1.21 odds) and another one in tennis for 425€ (odds 1.9 and 14.1% value!) both of which were successful.
IN THE BLACK! (after 600 settled bets)
Not being down feels like a huge win and I’ve won about 35 avg sized bets in 200 or 300 bets which just comes to show how volatile betting is.
Especially now that more and more major leagues are back I have been able to put in some bigger bets which is always nice. Im a bit afraid that I am putting in too much volume on my best bookmakers (bet365, PAF/Unibet, Nordicbet) and I should find some new ones as it would be nice to split some of the action with the same odds service to 2-3 different bookies.
Hopefully next week I will finally get my new office room set up with a nice sized monitor which will make betting much more comfortable compared to just the laptop or the mobile.
The UK came out with some credit card law changes in April from what I understand. The way you get around this is by: uploading from your credit card to Neteller and then transferring the money to Skrill (or vice versa), then you can use the money for gambling. Even in PayPal, I am assuming that if you upload money to paypal, gift it to another account, you get around the gambling requirement (which means that you would need a Neteller and Skrill account).
I was effectively blocked from NordicBet/Betsson. I didn’t realize that they were owned by the same mega corp and I was, for a while, happily betting on both sites, perhaps even with the same email address, to get around the bet size limits. meh.
-I added mrgreen.com alongside with PAF and Unibet to place bigger bets on the odds provider Kambi’s odds. (other options for later are (32)redbet, 888 and leovegas)
-I realized that I place most of my bets with my mobile while having coffee or what not, which might help me from getting banned so easily.
-I am trying to place in more combo bets on different sites to look more like a random bettor. Especially if they have nice combo offers. Playing some slots also should help a bit.
-I have the exact same betting limits on PAF and mrgreen now so I am fooling around with the slots and combo bets on PAF to see if they are helpful in increasing the betting limits vs mrgreen.
-I have placed a few bets with Coolbet and the Finnish state monopoly Veikkaus which is a bit slow because most of the time its a miss. I am still waiting for my new monitor which should come any day now which will give me lots of extra pixels for webpages to be open and ready for searching!
Below is a pic of 1204 settled bets. I was actually up to about 4500€ at one point (graph is day by day), so the swings are quite something. I have decided not to increase my bet size for now because I also need new sites and dont want to withdraw any more money from other sources.
The “better” results they see after having tweaked the settings are just dumb like aka variance.
ComeOn seems quite fast on changing their odds.
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