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How to win at football betting: tip #2

By Matt | January 11, 2010

Did you follow last week’s football betting tip and make your accumulator shorter? If you did, I hope you won. If you didn’t win – well, you wouldn’t have won with a longer acca!

This week’s tip takes last week and adds another level. Hopefully, what we’ve learned about betting on football is that no-one can be relied on. Not even the Manchester Uniteds of this world, as the Red Devils proved when they lost at home to Leeds United in the FA Cup recently.

The road to profit, we believe, therefore lies in allowing for this unreliability and factoring it into our calculations. We do this with permutations, or “perms”.

Football betting tip #2: the Trixie
Combining the perm and the short accumulator finds its sweet spot in the Trixie in my eyes. What is a Trixie? It’s effectively four bets on three selections: three doubles and one treble.

Therefore, if one of the three selection loses, one of the doubles still wins. The other two doubles and the treble lose, so the trick is to find three decent-price selections where a double pays more than 3/1, thus covering your losing bets and giving you a small profit.

Every now and again, all three will come in – guaranteeing a bumper payday.

I’ve had some big wins with Trixies in recent years, most recently on December 19th when I backed Fulham to beat Manchester United at odds of 11/2, Swindon to beat Brighton at even money and Nottingham Forest to beat Preston at 8/11.

A five-point Trixie cost 20 points and returned just over 250 points.

Note the inclusion of a short-priced Forest. A single on Forest could be had at odds of 4/5 but the other prices made it worthwhile to go with Betfred, who were best priced on Fulham and the Robins. Sometimes it’s worth including a short-priced banker as long as you don’t go daft: any shorter than 8/11 and I wouldn’t have got my money back if, say, Brighton had scrambled a draw at the County Ground.

If you’re going to include a banker, I’d almost certainly suggest a more speculative punt as one of your three selections. What I was basically banking on was Swindon and Forest winning, effectively giving me a free big-money bet on Fulham.

A word of caution here: I never bet on multiples in horse racing, and I’m not going to recommend anyone starts here. Horses have odds that justify betting in singles. And if you go bigger than a Trixie, you’re increasing your risk in my eyes. A Lucky 15 is a mugs bet on the nags, in my book, and it’s barely more sensible on the football. Anything bigger is just plain daft.

And don’t expect to win every week, but a steady stream of doubles and the odd three-timer coming in should ensure a healthy overall return on your investments.

So give a Trixie a try with this weekend’s football – one of the bookmakers advertised opposite will almost certainly want to make it worth your while!

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