Betting Strategies – How to measure your results

No time to read? Here are the key points of this post:

• In sports betting, you need to know if you are winning or losing in a consistent way
• Only when measuring your results you can find out how to improve your strategies
• You need many games to really know if your strategy is working or not
• Use a simple spreadsheet to measure your results.
• You don’t need to spend money to test a new strategy

Measuring your results is the only way to know if your strategy is working. You need to be able to answer 3 questions about your betting strategies:

• Am I winning or losing?
• If I keep betting based on this strategy, after 1000 matches, how much will I win or lose?
• What are the characteristics of the bets I am winning and I am losing? How do they differ?

Here is the cycle you need to understand:

You can learn more about betting strategies here.

Measuring your results

You need to measure your results to find out if you are winning or losing. It is a very SIMPLE task yet powerful to give you important information.  All you need to do is to record each bet, we recommend you writing down:

• Date, League, Teams, Odds, Stake (how much you bet on this team) and result

Here is a SIMPLE google spreadsheet where we record this information on our tips. You can use it as a model for yourself if you don’t have one yet (just make a copy of the file).
If you need further assistance to create a spreadsheet like this one for yourself send us an email stork@storksports.com and we will create one for you.

If you log on a spreadsheet every bet you make you will have all the info to understand if you are winning or losing.

Is my strategy working?

One thing is to log and measure your results, another thing is to use this information to know if your strategy is working or not.
In football, luck is a BIG part of the game… as you all know the team that plays better won’t win every game, there are a lot of surprises and that is why you can’t conclude a strategy is working or not with only a few games.
You can lose a few bets with a GOOD strategy, and you can win a few bets with a BAD strategy. You should NEVER judge a strategy based on a few matches.
There is a lot of statistical work on defining how many games you need to measure if a strategy is working or not but we will give you a simple rule: you need at least 30 bets to evaluate how a strategy is performing. Anything less than 30 you could be getting wrong conclusions.  If after 100 matches your strategy is still loosing, it is probably not working.

How can I improve my strategy based on the results I am measuring?

Once you are logging all your bets and you have a good number of bets (over 30) you can evaluate WHEN your strategy is working and when it is not working. The simplest ways to analyze it is to look at different segments of your bets, we recommend looking at:

• Results by different Leagues
• Results by different Stakes
• Results by different kind of bets (Home, Away, Draw)
• Results by Odds
• Results over time (by week and month)

So you can answer the following questions:

• Is my strategy working better when I bet on home or away teams?
• Is my strategy working better when I play high or low odds?
• Is my strategy working better in what leagues?
• Is my strategy improving over time?

These answers will help you IMPROVE your strategy. You may find that your strategy is much better playing away teams so you can start playing more away teams and fewer home teams for example. 

Do I need to lose money until my strategy improves?
Losing some money when you are still learning about sports betting is quite normal, but it is not entirely necessary! And here is why…
PRO TIP – You can have a “virtual bankroll” to test strategies
Once you have a new strategy you could log all bet you WOULD do with this strategy and measure the results WITHOUT actually betting. It is a great way to learn more about strategies and to only spend money when you are more confident in winning. We highly recommend you do this with new strategies.

Don’t forget to check the other posts from this series:
Odds are just probabilities
The best statistics for football betting
Long term x Short term form – which is better?
Betting Strategies – Why are they important?
How to win in football betting using statistics

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