8. The Faithful 5 Bet

The Faithful 5" is a Quintuple accumulator bet with a difference. It relies upon you being able to pick 2 absolutely reliable Outright Winners (Home Wins or Away Wins) which then become your "Bankers" (hence the "faithful" tag), and combining them with other 3 reasonably strong predictions. However, since the randomness of the results is so great, this bet incorporates what is often touted as a "fail-safe" device to allow you to collect something if any of those latter 3 matches let you down. It is based on the principle that the majority of Wins hang on a 1 goal difference, and so there is always the possibility of a last minute goal to turn the Outright Win into a Draw.

What this bet therefore requires you to do is to lay out the basic Quintuple alongside a series of other bets for all the combinations of the Draws for all those 3 matches where your faith in the outcome is not as strong as for the Bankers. This gives you 8 possible winning lines (only 1 of which you may be able to collect against), across which you have to spread the total stake proportionally so that, no matter which line you win against, your overall return will be roughly the same. This proportional staking is easily achieved with the aid of a spreadsheet, which we have already compiled for you (see the Downloadable Excel Files under FREE DATA - Betting Advice).

Assuming that all the match predictions are for Home Wins, the 8 betting combinations would be as follows:

Unfortunately, our findings are that if you are betting on Favourites with this particular bet, then you will need at least 75% overall reliability for the Bankers and not more than 25% combined unreliability for the 3 "support" matches, otherwise it will be impossible for you to make money consistently over the course of a season. Its major drawback is that it is a Fixed Odds accumulator bet (with all the disadvantages still attached), and the additional lines simply deplete your winnings because the stakes per line are reduced.

This is not to say that you couldn't get lucky from time to time and get a big payout because all 3 "support" matches turned out to be Draws. But the chances of that happening are less than 1 in a 100.

If you are going to stand a chance of making money with "The Faithful 5", we have found that there are two essential things you can do to improve your chances:

1. either find Value Bets not just for the Bankers but for all 5 matches,
2. or make your hedge for the 3 support matches the Away Win instead of the Draw.

Note that the above two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although we have set them down that way. The reason we have done so is that if you have identified a solid Value Bet on the Home Win, then the Away Win will not offer as much value as the Draw. What you need to do before you ever commit to this form of bet is test out a few of your past selections and see if you could have won by applying one or more of the various betting options. To allow you to do that easily, use the downloadable Excel spreadsheet we have compiled. All instructions for its use are contained on the spreadsheet.

Exotic Betting Downloadable Spreadsheet

With this bet, if you lay out on the Draw as the fallback position for the 3 support matches you will lose everything if (i) one or other of the 2 Bankers fails to achieve the Win or (ii) just 1 single Away Win crops up amongst the 3 support matches. If you opt to bet on the Away Win as the alternative result, you will lose if (i) one or other of the 2 Bankers fails to achieve the Win or (ii) just 1 single Draw crops up amongst the 3 support matches.