The Insider Update on Variance Betting

Way back in 2005, I joined a couple of friends and started betting professionally on American sports. It turns out they were pretty good at it and wanted more help on the data side to kick on. I was the help.

It turns out I was pretty good at betting on sports as well, and that grew into a fairly impressive career and later hobby.

The Elephant in the Room
I understand some people have the perspective that “gambling is bad,” caused in large part due to worries around addictive behaviour and problem gambling.

I don’t bet like that. I don’t gamble in casinos, and I only place bets where I am pretty sure I have a sustained edge. What I do is much more like the stock market than the roulette wheel, and plenty of my friends have made entire careers as professional gamblers. (Rufus Peabody, Jeff Ma, and Matthew Benham come immediately to mind.)

Part of the idea behind Variance Betting, which you can sign up for here, was teaching people how to bet better, while giving me a VERY public way to track my wagering and results at a level you basically never see from a professional sports bettor. (Like Tony Bloom and Benham used to be before they shifted to owning large, expensive things like football teams and betting on player transfers instead.)

Since I am casual now and not professional, my wagers have been £200 each and not £20,000 or £200,000. At that small level, I could afford to lose every wager I place and it would not materially affect me.

Thankfully, I have not lost every wager this season. Far from it.

Anyway… today’s piece is a bit of results tallying, and some analysis on which teams I have won/lost the most on. I’m but also filling in some requests readers have had regarding advice on where to create accounts to get similar lines and prices to what I get.

The Results

Big Picture: +14 on approx 50/50 lines.
Win/Loss: +£1574

EPL (86 wagers)
Spreads: +5.5
Totals: -0.5
Win/Loss: +516
Hold: 2.8%

Eng Champ (102 wagers)
Spreads: +8.5
Totals: +1
Win/Loss: +1096
Hold: 5%

UEFA CL (37 wagers)
Spreads: -0.5
Totals: +0
Hold: -0.5%
Win/Loss: -38

Note: The P&L above includes two outright bets (for 100 each) that I explicitly suggested people take, one on Zagreb in the CL, and the other on QPR just recently. Everything else is a main line on either the spread or the total, that was also included in my columns at constant stakes. It does not include any outrights against Manchester City because those were not explicitly recommended in the analysis columns.

The Process
I combine a couple of different models to create ratings for each team, then I cross-reference that with injury information, sprinkle in Home Field Advantage, et voila! we have my version of what the handicap should be. I then compare it to the Market Price, and when those differ by approximately a quarter goal or more (.25), I place a wager.

All bets are placed 1-2 days prior to the matches occurring, which isn’t true early market, but it does allow us to take advantage of prices we like that the gambling hedge funds might also like, before liquidity opens enough for them to get involved.

Wisdom of Crowds
I put up a poll on Twitter (because BlueSky does not have polls yet) to find out which PL teams though I had won and lost the most money on so far this season.

And now for the ACTUAL results.

Winning Premier League

Leicester 7, +3.5
Forest 12, +3.5
Fulham 6, +3
Everton 3, +2.5 Yet to lose a bet
Chelsea 4, +2.5. Yet to lose a bet

A professional gambling tale as old as time - find the unfancied team near the bottom of the standings who is just slightly better than people think they are, and ride that horse again and again. In this case, it’s been Leicester.

But weirdly, at the other end of the table, Forest have been a play since I started this. No one expected them to be this good, and certainly no one expected them to stay this good. We kept getting lines that were half a goal or more in favour of our team, and they mostly performed.

Meanwhile, I rarely bet on the two teams from Manchester. Only 2 bets on Man United (+0), and 1 on Manchester City for the home match against Arsenal (-1, obv)

But there were other trends that aren’t obvious in who you bet on. One was actually the most profitable PL move of them all, and also the most unexpected as of pre-season. (RIP City to win the league futures. Yay LFC long shot ones.)

AGAINST MANCHESTER CITY
Away 4, +4
Home 4, +2
Spotting the City collapse and then wagering against them was profitable both here and in the Champions League. I might have been a little late to the move, but the models will take ages to catch up

+3.5 on Brentford Home matches 
Definitely should have bet more Overs 😞. For some reason, I’ve generally felt I had a cleaner read on what would happen at Bees home matches than the market, including the times when they were likely to struggle.

Against Liverpool at Home
5, +1.
Have not bet against them away - Prob should have at Palace

Against Newcastle Away +2

Bournemouth 8, 0
I am the Bournemouth jinx!

Losing Premier League
Brighton 7, -3
Villa 7 bets, -2.5
Spurs 5, -1
Arsenal 1 bet, -1
Overs 2, -2

Villa have never covered an away Spread for me. I probably should have lost more there, but got very gun shy.

Brighton started off hot and then gradually regressed back into midtable, and I lost a bunch of bets on that regression. Can they get back into the European spots? Will I just keep losing bets on them? (Probably.)

Here’s the amazing thing about betting - all these trends and tendencies could completely flip for the second half of the season. Those who have read the Variance Betting analysis know injuries have been a huge factor so far this season. As are head coaches, and we’ve seen a host of those change in the last two months.

The changes - and trying to stay ahead of the market by using model-informed betting combined with elite football knowledge is what makes it so challenging and generally fun. (It’s fun when you are winning - it CAN be miserable when you are losing, but I have a lot better perspective on those times than I did when I was younger.

English Championship
I still think this is the most fun league to follow in the world. It’s monstrously competitive, while also being a meatgrinder. Some teams have large budgets, some tiny. Some have terrible coaches, some genuinely excellent ones. Which teams have I won and lost on so far this season?

Winning Eng Champ
Sheff United 8, +5.5
Norwich 5, +4
Oxford 4, +2.5
Hull 2, +2
Sunderland 6, +1.5
Bristol City 5, +0.5

Losing Eng Champ
Leeds 5, -1
Millwall 12, -1.5
WBA 5, -1.5
Coventry 3, -3

There are bits and bobs elsewhere, but these are the major ups and downs. I have yet to win a bet on Coventry this season. And have lost an additional -3.5 on bets either against Coventry or on Totals in their matches. They are my Bermuda Triangle - zero bearing on what could happen in their matches.

Millwall had been very up and down and then their head coach left, so we’ll see what happens there for the rest of the season.

On the winning side, I think I profited on Oxford a ton immediately after Rowett, and I won a decent amount prior to then simply betting against them.

Why Discount Bookies MATTER
In EPL and Eng Champ, I am +14 base wagers on 182 bets (7.7% neutral ROI). At a flat 200 stake, if I were purely +14 wagers on 50/50s with no vig (bookie margin), you’d expect me to be up 2800. As it is, without the two outrights, that number is more like 1100.

So I have paid £1700 in vig overall (and the vig varies a lot more in football than it does in American sports).

Given the vig on the Champ is higher on Fridays, I’ve been betting on lines with an average of about 3.5 to 4% in total to make my bets.

If your bookie margin is double that, like you often see elsewhere, I would actually be in the negative despite being a highly winning bettor.

To say this in a different way: You are not going to find bonuses that pay you back your £1700 in bookie margins. Or even 170!

So… one of the main requests I have received is where can people bet to get better margins?

The answer is “it depends on where you live and what’s available to you,” but hopefully one or two of the below help answer some people’s problems.

1) Bet105.EU

Of the bookies I have access to, I use have used Bet105 most often this year. They are new, but I have known the people who run it for a long time. You can find out more details on what they are about here.

Next week, we will ALSO start running special promos with Bet105 that will continue throughout the season.

They are solving A LOT of issues for thoughtful bettors, and I expect them to be very successful in the future.

2) PinnaclePinnaclePinnaclePinnacle

For those who don’t know, I worked here for almost a decade and helped rebuild their entire product offering when they left the U.S. market. They have been around over 25 years and are THE gold standard in bookies.

They pride themselves on allowing winners to play, at the best prices, with the highest limits. If you are trying to edge grind props and single-game parlays, this probably isn’t the place for you, but if you bet like I do… it’s amazing.

I continue to know many people who work here, and if you can get in, Pinnacle remains the single best place to wager on almost anything in the world.+

3) Bet365
I cannot bet at this one because they believe I am too good to make money from. But for those of you that already have accounts there, you can find some of the cheapest prices and most diverse offerings of lines in the world on game day.

And if you are creating a new account, I HIGHLY recommend not playing most of my picks there at the start or you’ll quickly get limited. You really have to act like a wolf in sheep’s clothing to keep your account here. Maybe bet on some random accumulators for small stakes. And deposit with your credit card to start.

Note: We do receive a sign-up fee for new funded accounts at Bet105 and Pinnacle. And then if you win, we never receive another dime. I had tried to negotiate deals based on volume bet only, but while common back in my Pinnacle days, those deals have basically disappeared from the industry in the past decade.

That works for me, because when I built this business, I never expected affiliate marketing to be a major component of our income stream. My picks and analysis are public to help people get better at betting. The courses we launch this summer will be designed to do exactly the same thing.

Second Note: If you are a gambling entity and want to discuss advertising or partnerships with me, simply reply to the email. I will be EXTREMELY choosy in picking partners, and you’ll need to prove you can offer something useful to our readership.

One More Change to Come
As I mentioned, I have been flat betting every wager so far this season at £200. That changes as of now.

From here out, my bet size will be the number of subscribers we have on Variance Betting. As of this morning, that was £302, but that will presumably keep going up as more people hop on board.

I’m also bringing back the Friday Betting show on YouTube to provide EPL gambling analysis in public. If you like this type of stuff, tune in and tell your friends. And if not, no worries.

How do you feel about things so far?
In my best seasons betting the Premier League and English Championship, I was holding 7-11% on initial wagers. I was always very good at betting on these leagues… but often not so good at betting on the other European leagues, partly due to variance, but also due to lower levels of expertise.

The current level of return feels pretty good? Lines are definitely harder to beat on the surface than they used to be. The influence of statistical models is very obvious now in ways that were barely hinted at a decade ago. That said… the rise of the models means plenty of profits for those who pick up on the model holes and changes in teams early and often. Which is possibly weird on the surface, because it means in the era of AI, human expertise remains crucial to making money.

I have also definitely left some money on the table so far this season. I have been very cautious about betting instinctive wagers that go against the model numbers. And I am not spending 60+ hours a week on this task - I am treating it as a hobby that I care about, while providing great insight for subscribers, but not letting it consumer my whole life like the olden days.

It’s a tough balance to strike.

Thank you again for all of the support, and enjoy your FA Cup weekend.

—TK