Home of football statistics and historyIt’s the start of another season, and though some things never change — Mourinho moaning about only having a net spend of a little over £300 million — it is a good excuse to turn over a new leaf. How about trying something new and different when it comes to your wagering strategy for the coming season? This article will look at a type of strategy that may at first appear straight out of left field but has a lot more going for it than you think.
Photo by Aleksandr Osipov / CC BY SA 2.0
It’s all about progression
Long before people thought about putting money on football matches, and there even were football matches, the masses were chancing their arm in casinos. One of the world’s most popular games, roulette — whose name incidentally comes from the French word for “little wheel” — has tested some of the greatest mind s on the planet trying to come up with a winning system. The good thing, though, is that with very little effort, some of those strategies can be applied to football.
The progression strategies we are going to look at are based on the roulette system in black or red. Now, all of these strategies revolve around the idea that the odds for each spin are 50/50 or evens in other words. Of course, in the casino, that is not the case, as you have a little thing called a zero (or two zeros if you are in the States). With football, however, you are in the fortunate position where you can choose the odds by selecting a game or a group of games with the odds at evens.
How it works
There are two things to understand before adopting these strategies. Firstly, they are designed to work over a long period of time. A season is perfect. Secondly, this is not going to make you rich, but come next May, you have a good shot at being up.
To start, choose a match or a double, treble, accumulator — anything you like — but ensure the combined odds are at evens (or as close as you can get). There is no point in getting greedy. If you have a sneaky suspicion Cardiff is going to turn over the hitherto impressive Liverpool, this is not the place to roll those dice. The next thing you need to do is choose a type of progression and stick with it.
Different versions of progression
In a nutshell, progression is a system that dictates the amount you place on the next roll/spin/match based on the result of the previous one. There are several types, classed as positive or negative. In a positive progression, you increase your wager every time you win whereas, in a negative progression, you increase it each time you lose. For our purposes, we need to use a negative one.
Like all wagers, and particularly with progression where you are increasing your unit stake, ensure you chose a method and unit stake with which you are comfortable, and one that you can afford. We will look at three different types.
The D’Alembert System
Probably the simplest and safest system, and a good place to start. Increase your wager by 1 (1x your unit stake) every time you lose and decrease it by the same margin when you win.
The Martingale
This one was the first to be adopted in the casinos. The disadvantage of this strategy is that you could find yourself quickly having to place large wagers, so should be used with caution. Every time you have a losing wager, you have to double your next stake (i.e., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 where each figure represents the amount you multiply your unit stake by).
Fibonacci
Photo by Begoon / CC BY-SA 4.0
Evidence of the Fibonacci sequence is visible everywhere around us, from architecture to nature. Thankfully, for us, it also lends itself to a fantastic progression technique. It is created by adding the two previous numbers together, so it looks like 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…, etc.
It benefits from being more conservative than the Martingdale, but at the same time, will give higher returns than with the D’Alembert method.
No method is guaranteed, but it is not a bad thing to have a dedicated, structured strategy, one that goes some way to negate random variables and emotion from the game. Those two may be the very things that make it such a globally loved sport, but they are also the cause of many an accumulator becoming derailed.
0 Comments
