14. Selection System Limitations

If you still lose money with the output from a Selection System, then it is totally useless to you, even though it may boast an average 60% success rate for its top 10 Home Win predictions. If you haven't used an organised Selection System before, we can hear you asking now whether such a situation can truly occur. And the answer is, yes it can, more often than not! So allow us to explain just how it happens for teams with a 60% chance of winning:

1. the "fair" decimal odds would be 1.67 (that is,100/60);
2. if you were lucky, the Odds actually offered would be 1.55;
3. you put on, say, 10 bets at £1.00 each;
4. the team managed to win 60% of its games, as expected;
5. you received 6 x £1.55 = £9.30;
6. you lost £0.70 for getting 6 out of 10 bets right!

You would not have fared much better if you had tried to bet against that same Home team winning, because there are two other possible outcomes - the Away team Win and the Draw. In this particular case, since the Home team is comfortably strong, the Draw outcome would be the most likely scenario, but you would be very fortunate if all the non-Home Wins turned out to be Draws.

On average across all UK soccer Divisions, the outcome for the two different non-Home Win results would be split: 2 for the Away team Wins and 2 for Draws. Under that scenario, if you had bet on Away team Wins you would have broken even (assuming odds of 5.00), but if you had been betting on the Draws, you would have lost £3.00 (using odds of 3.50 to maintain the quite-usual 112.50% Over-Round "balance"). And even if you were lucky and 3 Draws had come up, you would have gained only £0.50.

The reality of it is that, ideally, you have to abandon "favourites" betting and find those bets that offer "value". It is true that first-class data has to be available for any Selection System to be able to identify genuine Value Bets, but believe us when we say that it is possible. At the very least, in the absence of any more specific information to enable you to identify Value Bets, it generally makes better betting sense not to place too many bets where the Odds are patently unfair.

However, the majority of Selection Systems on the market are unable to identify Value Bets, yet it's what you need a Selection System to be able to do for you if you are hoping to make any money from Fixed Odds betting. Most Selection Systems fail you there, primarily because they can't even tell you what the Fixed Odds are in the first place. Without that Fixed Odds data, it is impossible to identify Value Bets. So look for a Selection System that faithfully incorporates this basic principle of betting strategy into its output.