Which Price Represents The Best Value For Money?

You should always bet at the best available price. Sometimes, it is not immediately apparent what this is. While you are comparing odds on an identical event, it is.

If one bookmaker is quoting 11-8 about a football team winning a match and another bookmaker down the road is quoting 6-4, you should take the trouble to go down the road and get the 6-4.

If you accept only good bets - still easier said than done, you will win more money than you lose. If you always bet at the most advantageous price, you will maximise your winnings.

And it's not just the odd halfpenny we're talking about here. If you could get 6-4 on every bet you would otherwise have accepted at 11-8, your profit on winning bets would go up by almost ten per cent.

There are professional punters who say that, for them, the difference between profit and loss over a season amounts, in practice, to nothing more than their insistence on always betting at the best available price. Use a good odds comparison site like bookiesindex to find the best price.

All punters, from the most successful to the least successful, could improve their profit and loss account by doing the same.

Okay, so much for the simple stuff. Nowadays, it's not so simple. Nowadays, there are many different ways of betting on a football match. Let's consider only the most common of the result-related ones.

You could back a team to win a match with a fixed-odds bookmaker. You could buy their supremacy with a spread firm - or, alternatively, buy their 25:10:0 index, which makes up 25 if they win, ten if they draw and zero if they lose. You could back the team on an Asian handicap with another fixed-odds bookmaker.Which represents the best value for money?

Let's suppose you can back a team to win a match at 6-4, buy their supremacy for 0.15, buy their 25:10:0 index for 12.5 or back them at 1.95 off scratch on an Asian handicap (with your stake returned if the match is drawn).

In this example - which does occur - the best bet is actually the Asian handicap, followed by the 25:10:0 index, supremacy and, lastly, the straightforward win wager.

In other real life examples, however, the order would be different.

You will see, for example, that if you can buy a team's supremacy for 0.8 you will have an exactly comparable price if you can buy their 25:10:0 index at 16.4, back them to win the game at 1.80 (4-5) or back them on an Asian handicap giving up three-quarters of a goal at 2.03 (slightly better than evens). If you could get, say, 1.83 (or 5-6) about the win, you would have a better bet than the buy of supremacy at 0.8.

The best policy is always to bet at the most advantageous price, irrespective of the medium. You should, however, familiarise yourself with the characteristics of each of those mediums. If you find you are uncomfortable with any of them, stay away from them. There is no shame in this.

With a fixed-odds bet you can, depending on the odds, win many times your stake. You can only lose your stake.

With a spread bet you can either win or lose many times your stake. In the football supremacy market, for example, the average make-up is 1.3 goals away from the midpoint of the original quotes. But in some games it will be many more. You should remember this when deciding on the level of your stakes.

Some people love the volatility of spread betting. Others do not. If you are one of them, don't worry - don't spread bet.

With Asian handicaps you have a fixed-odds bet which is always pretty close to even money. If, say, you back an outsider getting a one-and-a-half-goal start, you will lose your stake if they go down by two goals. But you will still only lose your stake if they are beaten by three goals - or four, or five, or any other number.

With an Asian handicap bet, however, you will never a win a sum much bigger than your stake. With fixed-odds bets and spread bets, sometimes you will.