If you are an avid soccer bettor, then you will no doubt have browsed through a multitude of online soccer betting websites to see what services are available. Frankly, it’s hard to avoid misleading terms like “safe bet”, “banker”, “certified dead” or “guaranteed winner”. Many tipsters incorporate these terms into the URL of their sites in hopes of increasing the number of subscriptions. As a bettor and tipster, this frustrates me greatly. Without opening the cans of worms that are the laws of mathematics and statistics, the simple indisputable fact is that there is no such thing as a sure result in football or sports. If there were a dead certainty outcome, there would be no bookmakers in the business to hedge our bets. Sometimes I read the few introductory paragraphs that insist that the professional tipster has a unique secret method for picking guaranteed winners. I think it should be illegal to make such misleading claims.
After more than 20 years of trials and tribulations as a football or ‘soccer’ bettor, I can tell you categorically that the whole notion of a dead certificate is not only false, but is itself a contradiction. If the outcome of a particular football match were a guarantee, surely there would be no need for teams to fight for ninety minutes. Furthermore, bookmakers would be clinically insane if they hedged bets on a game whose outcome was certain. I realize I’m possibly joking in my last few sentences, but it’s scary how many reasonably intelligent people will believe anything that’s written in print by a so-called ‘expert’.
When I started providing advice to the public through my website, I added a ‘Bankers Section’ every week. Now, the point of this section was to suggest that after hours of research and analysis of various games, I couldn’t really see any other result than, say, a home win. If a banker’s section game had a surprising outcome, I would suffer both as an informer and as a bettor. Sure enough, it made my tipping skills look incompetent to some of my members, not to mention that I personally would have also placed a sizeable bet on the game. There are still two games left in my mind and they bring back uncomfortable memories.
April 10, 2010, Scottish Cup: Glasgow Celtic 0 – 2 Ross County.
Premier League giants Celtic were unceremoniously knocked out of the cup by First Division side Ross County, completing one of the biggest upsets in Scottish football history. Many football accumulators or multi-bets were subsequently snapped in disgust by outraged punters.
February 21, 2010, Dutch League: PSV Eindhoven 1 – 1 Sparta Rotterdam.
This game was priced as low as 1.09 by bookmakers for a home win, such was the “certainty” of the outcome. PSV had won eleven league games in a row in Eindhoven and were facing a Sparta side who had already lost twelve of their away games that season, and were also relegated. To add insult to injury, Sparta scored the equalizer three minutes into stoppage time.
Big upset results like these obviously ruin accumulators, but more significantly they highlight the fact that you can never be sure of the outcome of a football bet.
