A degree of time and effort should go into placing a bet. One would recommend spending the amount of time it takes to write a betting preview on researching your prospective selection before making it. After all, that’s what the people who write betting previews have to do themselves. Before they feel comfortable enough to put forward a betting recommendation, a tipster will thoroughly research statistics related to the sporting event in question and analyse the likeliest outcomes.
Let’s use the example of a football match, Manchester United versus Tottenham Hotspur. Where the game is being played matters. If United are the home team and it’s at Old Trafford, you examine the home form of United as well as the away form of Spurs. You look at the general form of the two teams, where they each are in the table, and what their head-to-head record is like. Spurs may have won the last three matches but were any of those games at Old Trafford?
These details are crucial. It’s not uncommon to hear of teams who regularly get results against opponents yet have also failed to win a match at a certain venue for decades. For example, Crystal Palace have beaten United on numerous occasions over the last 30 years but none of those victories occurred at Old Trafford between 1989 and 2019.
In the latter year, they won there 2-1 with a last-minute winner by Patrick van Aanholt. The hoodoo now broken, the same result occurred again the following season. It shows that there is a psychological factor in place when numbers begin to rack up in the failure categories.
Each specific fixture can be a subcategory of sport all by itself. One would expect a match between Stoke and Middlesbrough to be a low-scoring encounter. Perhaps you would base this on the reputations of the clubs acquired in recent seasons or maybe on the scoring performance of the teams in question. Specific fixtures have a historical tendency to deliver on the goal front.
Games between Liverpool and Arsenal, for example, can generally be relied upon to feature goals. Before you go thinking you’re a genius for spotting this pattern, remember that bookmakers employ the same logic to anticipate likelihoods and dictate odds. The ‘over 3.5 goals’ bet would have high odds in most fixtures but not if the teams in question score those goals regularly.
You can look for more niche bets to combat this knowledge or even enhance the wager with an in-game accumulator, by using tools like Bet365’s bet builder. Shopping around for odds is a must after creating a shortlist of bets. Some bookmakers are more generous than others. It can be exhausting trawling through each and every betting site, so we recommend an odds comparison site like Win Comparator, which, in the linked section, compares football betting odds on a 24/7 basis.
Having this kind of tool on hand has made punters better-equipped for any wagers they place. Advances in technology have allowed bookmakers to reach new customers. It will always be difficult to beat the bookies but now we have more information at our disposal than ever before to anticipate outcomes. The odds aren’t as slim as they once were.