Sports Bet: Football

Betting on Football matches is one of the more popular sporting bets that are placed in bookies across the UK; they are exciting, easy to understand and fun, plus, the most attractive aspect of the sporting bet, and you can win money.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to bet within comfortably affordable parameters, in other words, do not bet more than you can afford, this will ensure that you always have fun, and do not spend the rest of the day regretting getting out of bed.

There are three general and distinct categories of bet that you can place on football matches in most bookies, they are ‘win bets’, ‘lay bets’ and ‘each way bets’. There are other, more complex, types of bet, but for the beginner understanding these three types will be sufficient to start off.

Win bets: this is a simple bet that you place on the outcome of a match by specifying who you want to win. Thus, if you bet on a football match between Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspurs and you bet that Aston Villa will win, then that is classed as a win bet.

Lay bet: this is the reverse of the win bet, where you bet on the outcome of a match by specifying who you think is going to lose, so taking the above example again, if you bet on Tottenham to lose, then you will have placed a lay bet.

Each way bets: this type of bet is slightly more complicated than the two other simple bets, they do not really apply to bets between two teams, but are used to bet on league tables or championships and betting on the outcome of the overall league or competition. If you bet ‘each way’ on a specific team then you are betting on that particular team to finish in first, second or third place (some bookies may even allow you to go to forth place if it is a large competition and you bet early on).

Another popular type of football bet is the ‘accumulator bet’:

 

 

Accumulator bet: this is when you place a collection of simple bets (i.e. a collection of win bets, lay bets or each way bets, but they are all linked together as one overall bet, in order to win all your bets must come in.

Thus, if you bet an accumulator on 3 win bets, then all three bets must win, but if your bet comes in you will win a lot more than you would if you had bet individually on each win.

The way it works, and one of the reasons why you make a lot more money, is that for each win the winnings are then staked on the subsequent bet so the amount of each stake rises with each win.

 

 

If you are new to the realms of betting on football matches then you need to realise that the bookies, who deal with these bets everyday and have a long history of doing so, know what they are doing and are usually fairly spot on with their odds and predictions of the outcome of the game.

It is not often that a bookies will make a bad prediction, although this years Grand National is a good example of how they can get it wrong (2009: the jockey who won was predicted at 100:1, although the bookies were laughing that day!!). But normally, the shorter the odds the more likely the win, odds of 2:1 are shorter than odds of 12:1.

In order to help yourself when it comes to placing football bets is to study the forms yourself, understanding how good the different teams are will help...