How I Made 1000% in 4 Months Betting on Football, Twice!
Second Edition
By Manny Sinder
Copyright Sinder Ltd 2017
ISBN
978-1-78808-043-9

Contents
1. Introduction to the second edition:
2. Acknowledgments:
3. Introduction:
4. The Difference between Sports Trading and Gambling:
5. Which Sports to Consider: 6. Which League to Consider: 7. Which Games to Consider: 8. The Bet:
9. The Unlikely Draw:
10. Cash Out:
11. How Much Money to Place on Each Bet:
12. Percentages, Odds and not Money:
13. Emotions:
14. What Can Go Wrong and How to Overcome It: 15. How I Made 1000% in Four Months, Twice: 16. How to offset losses:
17. Checklist:
18. Disclaimer:
Page 10 Page 13 Page 16 Page 18 Page 22 Page 26 Page 28 Page 31 Page 36 Page 41 Page 43 Page 47 Page 51 Page 59 Page 61
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Page 3 Page 5 Page 7

Introduction to the second edition
If you already fancy yourself as a leading Sports Trader or an expert Gambler then please put this book down, do not buy it and go and enjoy the millions you are making. If on the other hand you do fancy becoming a Sports Trader or would like a refresher on how you could go about your betting activities or would like to learn how a genuine Sports Trader goes about his business by incorporating the ‘lay bet’ then please go ahead and buy a copy of this book to enjoy it.
What publishing the first edition taught me was that the minority of regular gamblers who read the book had expected to find a ‘Golden Ticket’ or the ‘Holy Grail’ of betting when they finished reading it. These gamblers often reacted by showing a certain level of urgency and haste which is all too often displayed by those who lose allot of money in gambling. My message to these people is this – There is no such Holy Grail you idiots! If there was, why would betting companies still be in business? There is however a technique which I personally use and has served me well and it is this technique which I am sharing with you in this book. If anyone who has bought this book feels this strategy is not ‘Holy Grail’ enough for them (queue the trumpets) I suggest you utilise the strategy in the book, make your money back quickly and leave me a nice review by confirming how well the strategy worked for you; and then go back to your original search for the Holy Grail.
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After this page, the majority of this book shall contain the exact text from the first edition other than a few important tweaks here and there which have been added to further enhance the descriptive nature of the explanations. The main addition to this second edition is a brand new and important chapter on page 32 and the inclusion of the supporting checklist to help you become more consistent.
The new chapter entitled ‘How to offset your losses’ discusses a technique which Sports Traders can utilise to prevent any losses. That’s right, a way to prevent or minimise you losing your money, while maximising your winnings. The inclusion of this technique not only provides a great safety net but opens many doors in terms of the types of games you can place trades on.
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Introduction
Being a professional currency, commodities and indices trader, I have the tendency to formularise everything, create referencing charts and view all of my gains in terms of percentages. My style of trading is generally referred to as ‘Day Trading,’ and is regarded as a high risk method of trading within the industry. Most people who attempt to master this technique unfortunately fail due to the complexity of running multiple strategies when considering any one trade to be suitable. The advantage of being a self- taught trader has meant my thought process towards the mechanics of my job is without the constraints and controls which come with the training offered by most financial or corporate bodies to their new recruits. More importantly, I trade with my own money and I put my money where my mouth is! I do not gamble with other people’s savings, unlike some ‘professional’ traders and brokerage firms.
By nature, I have always been strategic and methodological in my planning and application of all work related tasks. My enormous self-determination and eye for detail have allowed me to succeed over many complex and head scratching tasks, and I believe due to these attributes I have managed to successfully overcome the complex nature of the world’s financial markets.
During the years I spent studying and calculating the financial markets, I was also unknowingly creating a unique trading
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model which would be applicable and customisable when creating an income from Sports Trading. It is this model which I will explain in this very book.
The strategy discussed in this book is based on a basic version of one my trading methods, which I currently use to trade the financial markets. I personally regard Sports Trading as an easier way of generating cash in some respects than my day trading profession.
I strongly believe that anyone can make the same gains I have made by correctly applying the strategy contained in this book to their favourite sport. But, before you consider placing your first bet, you should first read this entire book carefully.
The objective for this book is to simply share with the world my highly enjoyable Sports Trading strategy of placing calculated bets on football matches, and to explain how I succeeded in making a second income from placing bets on my favourite sport. Even though I have not met another ‘Sports Trader,’ I am sure they do exist so I have explained certain attributes related to such methodological beings with this assumption. I have attempted to keep all relevant descriptions short in all of the following chapters, and I have tried to keep all details very precise so the book may later be used as a point of reference.
Most books use these introduction pages and other chapters to babble on about things which carry little interest to the
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reader but help the author boost the word count of their book. I have no such intention in doing so here as my ego has been caged and tamed to prevent any such outcome.
I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I have enjoyed developing the strategy contained within it and writing about it.
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The Difference between Sports Trading and Gambling
The main difference between Sports Trading and gambling is the thought process involved in arriving at a specific answer. The question every Sports Trader should be asking is: Which sporting event is the most predictable and what is the most likely outcome of that event? By asking and successfully answering this essential question, any Sports Trader should be consistently multiplying his or her capital.
The market, in which a professional currency or commodities trader operates, is similar in many respects to how sports matches can be viewed. The price of a product such as gold can go up, go down or go sideward over a given timeframe. A sports match similarly can end in victory for team A or for team B or the match can be drawn. The point is, the number of possible outcomes for both markets are exactly the same and as a professional trader I view them as such.
A gambler will only comprehend one bet at any one time and though he or she may have won a large amount of money once or twice in their lifetime, they are normally running a large deficit and are down by much more than they have ever won or are likely to win. If gamblers became winners, the betting companies would be out of business. One of the key reasons why gamblers lose money is because they make irrational and illogical decisions when choosing where to place their money. Their thought process is influenced by their emotions and/or their desire to win the large amount
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of money which the betting shop is offering them in order to part them with their cash.
Gamblers lose more money than they make and Sports Traders make more money than they lose. Even when gamblers consciously realise they are losing money consistently, they will tell themselves (and others) that they are doing it all for fun and the winning does not matter to them. Do not believe them! When they lose, the loss of money will normally have a deep impact on their immediate happiness. They either realise it or they do not. Gamblers become addicted to the emotion they felt when they once won big and then constantly try to replicate that emotion by trying to predict outcomes which do not occur often enough because they are far too unlikely.
Unfortunately, due to their nature, gamblers never develop a methodological and calculated strategy and tend to gamble their money away. Sports Traders however, always stick to their strategy with a finely tuned assessment of each potential occurrence and think like traders of the financial markets. They view a single bet as one of many bets, and achieve a high percentage of correct predictions over many matches rather than placing all their eggs in one basket by placing a single bet or using a single match to make multiple bets, as gamblers do.
In my experience, gamblers tend to be ‘cross my fingers’ and ‘I have a gut feeling’ types of personalities with plenty of
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emotions attached to their favoured outcome. Sports Traders have a more robotic type of outlook and a precise criterion to which a selected sporting event must fit before they even consider risking a single penny.
Sports Traders have no emotions connected to any bet they place. They are purely in it to make money. Gamblers will tend to feel emotionally connected with either one of the teams or a preferential result.
The unfortunate thing about the difference between Sports Traders and Gamblers is emotions. What makes human beings human are our emotions and it is these emotions which can be the biggest disadvantage for gamblers, because emotions overpower their logical thought process when money is at stake. They fail to realise that money has no emotion or allegiance and unlike us human beings, it isn’t even real.
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Which Sports to Consider
The Sports Trading strategy contained in this book was originally developed to make accurate predictions for football matches some years ago but has since developed into a smart and reliable protocol which can be used to ascertain which sporting event is the easiest to generate revenue from and how to do so consistently. I have not tried applying this strategy to any of the American sports such as American football, baseball or basketball, so I reserve judgement on those sports until such time as I have had the opportunity to do so.
Though I have utilised the strategy to make money with rugby and cricket matches, I personally prefer using the strategy for football matches in any of the major European domestic leagues; but more so with the English Premier League. I much prefer the English Premier League because breaking news, statistics and information is more easily available to me as a resident of England.
When choosing which sport out of so many to use as your platform for Sports Trading, I suggest you first consider the sport you believe you know most about or is the most established sport in your part of the world. I am lucky enough to have played plenty of competitive sports at a good level in my childhood and early adulthood including football, cricket, rugby and athletics, but my knowledge and experience is more established in the world of football. If you
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live in a region of the world where no sport is established to the same high level of a major European sport or if the probability of a sporting event in your region being ‘fixed’ is high, then I suggest you follow a major European sport.
Before choosing the exact sport to utilise, you must first confirm the sport of your choosing is a popular sport throughout your country and the world –because large revenues and income streams earned by clubs should have already pushed the regulators and controllers of that particular sport into providing the fans with a healthy number of domestic and regional league and/or cup games each year. Examples of such sports are football and rugby.
Of all the sports in the world, football is by far the most popular and provides the most number of competitive matches (regional, domestic and national) and I have calculated this to be especially true in Europe.
In the UK, we have the English Premier League which provides fans with an average of two competitive matches per week during any given season, two types of domestic cup games and mid-week European matches. That is a large number of matches to choose from and exactly what you must be looking for because a good number of ‘highly competitive matches’ over a ‘sustained period of time’ shall provide you with plenty of opportunities to locate those matches where the odds are heavily stacked in one teams favour over the other.
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The preferred sport cannot be secluded to just your own country or region like domestic cricket is in India and Pakistan, or the Gaelic games are in Ireland, because even the most dominant teams will have a tendency to conjure up some bizarre and unexpected results or there shall simply be too few matches to choose from during any given season.
By having a large established following of fans, sport clubs are able to generate large pots of cash consistently and look to compete against other large clubs on a continental basis. A good example of this is Arsenal FC. They consistency compete for a European Champions League place each and every English Premier League season in addition to the two domestic cups. This type of consistency provides a stable and ‘mostly reliable’ anchor for any Sports Trader because you can start placing the odds in your favour by realising the reoccurrences of such strong possibilities.
By applying these types of high probability factors into your selection process, you can start to increase your chances of making money consistently by predicting the right outcome over a certain number of games against certain type of opposition. Dominant teams of any domestic league, of any sport, are a Sports Traders best friend.
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Which League to Consider
We discussed in the previous chapter the importance of choosing a major world sport as your platform for Sports Trading, because of the strong demand a large fan base creates for an ever-increasing number of competitive games to be played each season. We also discussed that such a sport should also have a domestic league which is highly competitive in nature and is consistently dominated by the same team or a cluster of teams each season. Though there are teams and clubs fitting these criteria in many different types of sports around the globe, I have not seen as large a number of suitable candidates as there are in domestic Football leagues in Europe.
Domestic leagues which I regard as being ‘suitable’ are England’s Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A. These major football leagues play host to some of the biggest clubs in the world, who in turn employ the very best players in the world to represent and play for them. As a consequence of this double marriage, those clubs which have consistently dominated their respective leagues over the years have also generated larger revenue streams than those clubs that have not been as successful. This financial gap has ultimately fuelled the existence of super clubs which consistently perform better than most of their domestic and European rivals and by doing so have further increased the gap between themselves and the less successful clubs. The lists of such domineering
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clubs include Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Juventus and Manchester United, to name a few. They are owned and directed by individuals who are in the business of making money and increasing profits year after year.
In order to increase profits year after year, teams must win as many games as possible in their respective domestic leagues so they can qualify for the Champions League for the following season. The qualification not only generates the type of interest and revenue which allow the big clubs to sign the best players from around the world but also be in a financial position to pay for them. This financially driven determination of these domineering clubs and their ability to buy the best players gives the average Sports Trader a massive advantage over the bookies, because we can assume that all big domineering clubs like Barcelona or Real Madrid shall have a superior win/lose ratio than all the other teams in their domestic league. In other words, a team like Barcelona who consistently qualify for the Champions League will win or draw most of their domestic matches and placing a bet for them to lose would be utterly disadvantageous to your cash balance.
By understanding and accepting this key statistic, we must next turn our attention to determining which types of games a domineering team are most likely to win, lose or draw.
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Which Games to Consider
We have ascertained that a Sports Trader should choose a sport which provides a large number of competitive matches and an established domestic league within which a cluster of domineering clubs compete (i.e. those teams which do well in that league year after year and have succeeded in creating a consistent gap of success between themselves and the lesser established teams by consistently qualifying to a more elite continental competition, and therefore are able to attract and pay the best players in the world). As concluded from my analysis, the leading domestic football leagues of Europe are by far the best suited for these criteria.
To explain and illustrate the next series of steps in executing this strategy correctly, I have chosen football as the preferred sport, the English Premier League as the preferred domestic league, Chelsea as the example domineering team and QPR as the example non-domineering opposition team.
When selecting a game to place a bet on, a suitable game must first be fitting the following scenario:
A domineering team which is situated at the top or near the top of their domestic league is playing a non-domineering team which is situated at the bottom or near the bottom of the same domestic league table.
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By using the league table below as an example of league standings, we can safely assume the top six teams as being suitable domineering teams and the bottom five teams as suitable non-domineering opposition. By only considering matches where a domineering team is playing a non- domineering team, you have located a high probability game which means a particular outcome is more likely than the other by a considerable margin of probability i.e. Chelsea (domineering) to beat QPR (non-domineering).
However, as fans that spend time and money watching their favourite team play home and away often realise, their team performs much better when it plays a home game rather than when they play the same game in their opponent’s home ground. In fact, domineering clubs such as Chelsea and Barcelona are far more likely to lose or draw a game away from their home stadium than they are playing in their home stadium. By accepting this statistical fact and avoiding any potentially surprising performances by the non-domineering home team, we are further increasing our chances by not considering those games which have a domineering team playing away from their home stadium.
Further examples of games fitting the criteria, and some which do not, have been listed below using the same league table.
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Game
Man City v Burnley Leicester v Man Utd Arsenal v Sunderland Liverpool v West Brom
Fitting to Criteria?
YES NO YES NO
As you would have noticed, we have marked the game Liverpool v West Brom as not fitting to the criteria. Even though Liverpool is a domineering club and situated towards the top of the table, their opponents are in fact a mid-table team. Even though the likelihood of Liverpool losing this match is small, we must remember that any team situated in the middle of any table is capable of winning as well as losing against any opponent. And since we do not want to take any unnecessary risks (i.e. gamble), we refrain from considering any such matches and pursue only those which fit to our
criteria
exactly.
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English Premier League (2014/2015 Season)
Position Team
1 Chelsea
2 Man City
3 Arsenal
4 Man Utd
5 Liverpool
6 Tottenham
7 S’hampton
8 Swansea
9 Stoke
10 Everton
11 West Ham
12 C Palace
13 West Brom
14 Newcastle
15 Aston Villa
16 Hull
17 Leicester
18 Sunderland
19 QPR
20 Burnley
Played Points 33 77
34 67
33 67
34 65 33 58 34 58 34 57 34 50 34 47 34 44 34 44 34 42 34 37 34 35 34 32 34 31
33 31 33 30 34 27 34 26
Type Domineering Domineering Domineering Domineering Domineering Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Mid Table Non- Domineering Non- Domineering Non- Domineering Non- Domineering Non- Domineering
At the time of writing this book, April 2015, Chelsea stand at the very top of the English Premier League and QPR are second from the bottom.
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The Bet
Now that we have chosen our sport, league and a criteria- fitting game, we come to the slightly tricky part. It is tricky because most people have probably never placed this type of bet before and many will not have even heard of it. The type of bet we are looking to place is called a ‘lay’ bet and is made available by most ‘betting exchanges’.
Most people who place a bet are hoping for an exact conclusion to manifest. An exact conclusion is nearly impossible to guess right on a regular basis so it is not a good way to treat or waste your money. The most ignorant type of bet is when a gambler tries to predict an exact numerical conclusion such as the number of goals to be scored in a game or the number of corners to be conceded. Only bookies win those bets and they will take your money all day, every day. The reason for the bookies’ success should be considered with the following mathematical viewpoint: The probability of you predicting something with the probability of about 1 in 30 (or more) is very small, and even though someone out there may have guessed the right number of goals scored, far more people have not been so lucky and the chances are, you will be one of unlucky ones. Do not throw your money away trying to guess nearly impossible numerical results. Stick to predicting the most likely outcome which has as fewer possible alternative outcomes as possible. It is easier that way. Win, lose or draw and that’s it.
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When I first created this Sports Trading strategy, I placed my bets by considering only those games which fitted my game selection criteria exactly, (i.e. Chelsea v QPR), and then placed my bet in favour of a Chelsea win. Even though I made my first 1000% gains with this technique, I later realised a major flaw in this process. By placing a bet on one team to beat another, I was in fact limiting my chances of winning because I was essentially backing one outcome from a possible three. Here is a simple illustration to explain this;
Game
Chelsea v QPR Chelsea QPR Chelsea QPR
v v
Result
Chelsea Win
QPR Win
Draw
Bet Placed Result Probability Chelsea WIN 1/3
Win
Chelsea LOSE 1/3 Win
Chelsea LOSE 1/3 Win
By backing just 1 out of 3 probable outcomes, which in percentage terms is 33.33% chance of winning and 66.66% of losing, my chances could not be regarded as being very good. In other words, you are far more likely to lose your money in the average game than you realise, especially in matches such as Arsenal v Chelsea, where two top domineering teams are playing each other and the most likely result is any one of three possible outcomes – Arsenal win, Chelsea win or a draw.
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Even though I had placed the odds in my favour of picking the domineering team (Chelsea) who was playing with home advantage against a non-domineering team (QPR), any result other than a Chelsea win would have resulted in me losing my entire initial stake and upsets do happen.
I overcame this disadvantage by turning the 1 in 3 chance of winning into a 2 in 3 chance of winning and this is how I succeeded in doing so. By using the same criteria of game selection, I ‘layed’ the QPR win instead of opting to bet in favour of a Chelsea win.
Laying means you are placing your money against an outcome which you consider to be the most unlikely to occur as opposed to placing a bet in favour for a single outcome to occur. By laying one outcome (i.e. QPR to lose), you are assuming the other two possible outcomes (i.e. Chelsea win or draw) are more likely to occur. By laying a bet, you are essentially doubling your chances of winning because you are opting to back two out of three possible outcomes.
Instead of placing my money behind the single outcome of a Chelsea win, by laying a QPR victory I had essentially backed two outcomes which are either a Chelsea win or the match to be drawn (a double headed bet or an each way bet in the horse racing world). As long as QPR did not win, I would win money. Here is a further illustration.
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Game
Chelsea v QPR Chelsea v QPR Chelsea v QPR
Result
Chelsea Win QPR Win Draw
Bet Placed Result Lay QPR WIN
Lay QPR LOSE Lay QPR WIN
As long as Chelsea win or draw with QPR, I would win money. By using this strategy, I changed my chances from winning from 1 in 3 to 2 in 3, which is 66.66% chance of winning. Now that’s what I call good odds!
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The Unlikely Draw
As I became increasingly confident in utilising my newly refined strategy of ‘laying the non-dominant team’, my research led me to believe that statistically, the least likely outcome in ‘any’ match was a draw. This least likely outcome was further enhanced when a domineering team like Chelsea was playing a non-domineering team like QPR with home advantage intact. Not only would Chelsea be more likely to win, statistically, they were also the most likely to score first and then go on to win the game.
The importance of this statistical information left me at the time with an important decision to make. I was left to decide if I should lay the non-dominant team (i.e. bet on them not winning) or lay the draw (i.e. bet on the match not ending as a draw). After much deliberation I decided on laying the draw. I continued selecting only those matches which fitted the all-important criteria (i.e. Chelsea v QPR) but changed my preferred outcome.
The reason for my change in choice was as follows. No matter what, a draw was statistically the least likely outcome of the three possible outcomes and therefore a safer bet. Furthermore, the domineering team was not only the most likely to win but also likely to score first and therefore my money was still just as safe if not more. The ‘key reason’ for my change from laying the non-dominant team to laying the draw was this. Even if the non-domineering team scored
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first, the likelihood of the match being drawn was still the least unlikely outcome, but should either team score a goal first, one very important option became available to me – the ‘cash out’ feature.
Because I was using online booking shops and not traditional high street book makers to place my bets, the apps and websites available to me on my mobile phone and PC not only allowed me to follow the games in real-time, but also offered me the all-important cash out facility. This facility now made the strategy as near to perfect as it could have been.
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Cash Out
The ‘cash out’ facility, which is available on many mobile betting apps and online platforms, has revolutionised the betting industry in my opinion. Traditionally, gamblers would need to go into a betting shop, place their bet and wait until the conclusion of the sporting event before being able to claim their winnings. The cash out facility however allows the Sports Trader using a ‘betting exchange’ to cash out at any time during the specified sporting event in real time, even if the result is not going in their favour (minus some loss if the result is going against them).
Here is an example of how the cash out facility works: For the game Chelsea v QPR, You have placed £10 against the draw (layed the draw). As long as Chelsea or QPR win you will be given your initial capital amount of £10 back plus any winnings (i.e. £5, in total £15). During the 10th minute of the game, Chelsea score. As you look at your mobile gambling app (or your PC), you are given the cash out option of £12. In other words, if you think QPR are likely to score, you may consider taking the £12 and closing the bet. If of course you decide to stay in the game and Chelsea go on to win the game, you shall win £15 (£5 profit + £10 original stake).
Where cash out options are available, the odds being offered are subject to change in accordance to the goals scored and the pressure being applied by either side in the actual game. Because the changes in odds in real time are the
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interpretation of the actual events of the game, they act very similar to a financial market based on demand and supply.
Having studied the statistics carefully, my standard protocol turned to cashing out my winnings as soon as either the domineering home team or the non-domineering team scored the first goal of the game. A goal scored by either team pushed the odds instantly in the favour of my lay bet because both the likely scenarios for which I was betting in favour for, were now more likely than the single unlikely outcome which I had layed my bet against (the draw).
With the adoption of this ‘first goal cash out’ technique, it further reduced my chances of losing any money in a game because I was guaranteed to win money as long as either team scored a goal and by choosing a match in accordance to the criteria, I was very likely to see multiple of goals let, alone just a single one.
After a significant period of back to back wins with this strategy, I labelled it the ‘First Goal Wins Strategy’ because in theory, as long as there was a goal, I would make money and as long as I was able to receive notice of the goal being scored, I would be able to make money instantly by cashing out, regardless of which team scored the goal.
It should also be noted that if you stick to the strategy and aim to cash out when the first goal is scored, then sometimes you will still run a small deficit if the non-domineering team
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has scored first at a very early stage of the game, but this normally changes as the match minutes elapse.
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How Much Money to Place on Each Bet
When any of my colleges in my former office in London wanted to follow my strategy and start making money as Sports Traders, they would first ask me how much money they should start off with in their online betting account. After initially answering a few of them with ‘whatever amount you do not need,’ I came up with the following structured formula. It should be noted that none of these people had any (or very little) previous experience in gambling so my objective was for them to learn the Sports Trading strategy while steadily growing their cash balance and well before committing any serious cash.
The smallest betting amount your chosen online betting shop will allow x 10 individual bets = £ initial starting balance
At the time, for most online betting companies, the smallest betting amount per game was £2. So £2 x 10 = £20 = 10 Bets. It is important to factor-in at least 10 bets because these extra bets will act as a cushion and liquidity for you to make up any losses you encounter.
The above formula was created by me during my initial 1000% gains and during the period when I was placing bets in favour of the likely winner. I have since, as mentioned, tweaked this strategy to laying the draw, which in turn changed this formula to as follows.
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Because I initially only had a 1 in 3 chance of winning the bet, I was only required to finance 1/3 of the market. However, when I started to lay a certain outcome, I was as by all intents and purposes placing two bets because I had 2 out of 3 chances of winning. As a result, I was required to finance 2/3 of the market. In other words, as my chances of winning increased, the initial capital required to finance that safe bet also increased. Here is an illustration.
Predicting the Winner (low stake/high returns)
Game
Bet Placed
Chance of Winning
What your Capital Covers
Required £
Chelsea v QPR
Chelsea Win
1/3 (33.33%)
QPR win or Match is Drawn
£2
Laying the Draw (high stake/low returns)
Game
Bet Placed
Chance of Winning
What your Capital Covers
Required £
Chelsea v QPR
Lay the Draw
2/3 (66.66%)
If Both Teams Draw
£2
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As a consequence of change to laying an outcome in a particular game, the formula to calculate the initial starting cash balance was changed to the following:
The smallest betting amount your chosen online betting shop will allow x 10 individual bets x 2 (for the extra likely outcome) = £ initial starting balance
It is important to note that though I risked a larger initial stake in this refined version of the strategy, the significant increase in the likelihood of a result in my favour outstripped the chance of me losing a single penny of that stake.
In order to grow your cash balance at a steady rate, it is also important to adjust the starting cash balance formula (as above) every time you increase or double your cash balance. For example, if you started with a £100 cash balance and you doubled that amount in 2 weeks, you would then need to increase the size of your stake per game to keep in line with the strategy. Here is an illustration:
Cash Balance
£100
£200
£1000
£6500
Stake per Game (10%)
£10
£20
£100
£650
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The formula to calculate the stake you should risk per game once you have doubled your starting cash balance should be as follows:
Cash balance / 10 (Individual bets) = Stake per game in £
Gamblers never consider the ratio of a high stake/low return bet as being a favourable bet, because they only see the amount of money they are going to lose when compared to any potential winnings. To them a low stake/high return bet is more attractive because they are only required to place a small stake for much bigger return. To them a low stake/high return bet is always too attractive to resist because they never consider the enormous reduction in the likelihood of their preferred outcome manifesting.
Gamblers due to their emotional thought process of selecting their bets never reach the conclusion that it is better to try and make a small return on a safe bet rather than trying to make a larger return on a bet which is more unlikely to manifest. Gamblers are constantly pulled towards the potential of making large gains by risking only a small stake, which of course normally results in them losing their entire initial stake anyway.
Gamblers, like most people, keep their savings in their local high street bank because they think it is safe to do so even though the interest rate they are earning on their savings is close to zero. Yet, when it comes to placing their money in a desirable betting situation, the very same people will throw
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their cash at a hunch or some other emotional reasoning with little chance of seeing it again.
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Percentages, Odds and not Money
One of the biggest obstacles Sports Traders and gamblers need to conquer is how they calculate any potential profit. Gamblers will tend to throw money towards single bets because the odds are very good and they are swept off their feet by the potential of the high rate of return. They constantly and consistently fail to realise that the odds are very good because the ‘professional’ book makers (i.e. those businesses which make money from gamblers getting it wrong), deem that outcome, which they are willing to place money towards, as being ‘very unlikely.’ By making the gambler think about how much money they could win if that ‘unrealistic’ outcome actually materialised, they persuade the gambler to follow his/her emotions and ‘take a gamble.’ There is no room for emotions in any type of financial markets. Not in currencies, not in commodities and certainly not in Sports Trading.
Sports trading has a different approach to betting when analysing potential profit. It is firstly engaged with the making sure the probability of the favoured outcome is stacked highly in your favour and secondly it is less concerned about the odds in comparison to the gambler because of two reasons. Firstly, because a Sports Trader has a professional outlook and never wants to lose any money and happily exercises a patient game by using 5-10 individual games (or considerably more) to make the same money a gambler aims to make in a single game. The second reason is
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percentages: A Sports Trader views profit from a potential bet in terms of percentages, which is something nearly all gamblers fail to consider.
By using our existing example, Chelsea v QPR, let’s say our favoured betting company is offering us the following odds for the following probable outcomes:
Odds Stake Profit
Chelsea win £10 £2 QPR win £10 £80 Draw £10 £16
Likelihood
VERY HIGH VERY UNLIKELY UNLIKELY
As mentioned above, for most gamblers, a bet in favour of a QPR win could be emotionally unavoidable when they consider the potential profits from such an outcome. In reality, the occurrence of a non-domineering team beating a domineering team in their home ground happens maybe once or twice a season. A gambler would lose more money than he or she could ever win if they tried to predict such irregular outcomes.
A Sports Trader will look at the above illustration in the following percentage terms.
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Odds
Chelsea win QPR win
Draw:
Stake Profit
£10 £2
£10 £80 £10 £16
Likelihood
VERY HIGH
VERY UNLIKELY UNLIKELY
Profit in %
+20%
+80% +16%
By placing his/her money in a very secure trade (i.e. in a very likely outcome), a Sports Trader will make 20% returns on the initial capital and in approximately 90 minutes or less. Let’s just think about that for a minute by comparing this type of profit.
Warren Buffett, an American investor who is regarded as one the world’s greatest investors by many in the financial world makes on average 20% profit each year on his investments.
At the time of writing, the Bank of England base interest rate is 0.5% which in turn means British banks are paying between 1-5% interest to savers – that is ‘per annum’.
At the time of writing, the average interest on UK 1 year fixed rate bond is between 1.2%-1.6%.
If we put this information into a comparison chart, this is how it will look.
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Comparison Item
Sports Trade: Chelsea Win Warren Buffett Savings Account 1 Year Bond
Percentage Gain
20%
20%
2.5% (average) 1.4% (average)
Time Period
90 minutes
1 year 1 year 1 year
As you can see, for just 90 minutes of trading, we make profits which rival and exceed those of other more established financial products/experts. If we consider all the above percentages in an annual-only time period then we would have to create a formula to convert our 20% gains from 90 minutes to 1 year. Here are my attempts for such a formula:
20% x 352 days of the year = 7040% Or:
20% x 40 League/Cup/Champions League games per year (approximately) = 80%
In my experience of using this strategy, there are normally 1.5 suitable games on average, per week in an 8 month English football season and my average earnings per game have been 20% per match. Therefore, this statistic can be portrayed by the following formula:
1.5 games x 4 weeks per month x 8 months = 48 games 39

20% x 48 games = 960%
In other words, if you had started the season with a £1000 cash balance in your Sports Trading account, you would have turned that into £10,600. I personally know these figures are more than achievable and certainly in much smaller timeframe than an entire season when the strategy is used across different sports and leagues.
It is important to always view potential gains in this way (in percentages) because by doing so it takes away a reliance on the amount of financial gain you are making and allows the emphasis to be placed on how well the strategy you are applying is working for you and how well you are sticking to the strategy.
It would also make good sense for a new Sports Trader to practise this strategy over a season (at least) by placing small bets initially and until they get to know the strategy well enough to operate with confidence (but not over confidence). Practising to make decisions without the effects of emotions (which will otherwise overburden a new Sports Trader if they risk more money than they can emotionally or financially handle to lose, when a game begins to go against their preferred outcome) will ensure that when the stakes are higher, the Sports Trader will stick to the strategy and limit any losses and continue to make gains overall. Your emotions are your biggest enemy in Sports Trading and the next chapter explains why.
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Emotions
From all the different types of people I have coached, lectured, spoken to or discussed in detail about the methodology of Sports Trading, those who loyally follow or support a Football team/club tend to make the worst Sports Traders.
I would like to say that this is due to the emotion and loyalty they attach to their favourite football club but there is nothing further from the truth. They tend to find it impossible to stick to the strategy for a sustained period of time and begin to make decisions which end in them losing their money. The very decision they have made to associate a football team with their personality generally means they are lacking an equal portion of logic in the first place. This is important because when people win or lose money, their emotions and confidence goes up and down in accordance to their achievements. As a currency, commodities and indices trader, I know the importance of what traders call ‘trading psychology,’ the same principles of which can be applied to Sports Trading. In order to overcome this obstacle of decreased logic, it is important to constantly have your logical mind in the forefront when making any decisions when using this strategy.
Sports Trading is an unemotional activity based on taking small calculated risks which are very robotic in nature. You must stick to the strategy and not become disheartened or
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over confident and start doing anything other than what the strategy allows you to do.
One friend of mine lost all of his cash balance because he was betting in favour of his favourite team, even though he logically knew it was a disastrous bet to consider. Another friend became so over confident after four consecutive wins that he decided to place his whole cash balance on one team and on a single outcome. Needless to say, he lost his entire balance (and closed his account). Remember, it is not personal, it is business! Stick to the strategy and you will never lose more than 10% of your cash balance in a single bet but more importantly, if you do lose, you will still live to fight another day and have enough capital to not only make your money back but go on to multiply your winnings further.
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What Can Go Wrong and How to Overcome It
At some point or another, you will lose a bet. How you handle the loss will possibly be the most challenging element of executing this strategy. The longer you go without making a loss, the harder it shall be to emotionally accept one when the losing outcome does arrive.
Gamblers tend to become partially desperate in their attempt to make up any losses and normally react by throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the next available opportunity in an attempt to win back what they have just lost. They tend to feel they have too much to lose or they convince themselves of having a ‘gut feeling’ about the next match, when in reality they are about to place the same type of bet as the one they have just lost.
Sports Traders on the other have patience and realise that all financial charts eventually climb higher and only in a stagnated fashion (i.e. two steps forward and one step back). As long as they gain overall and over any given period, they are winners.
I developed the following list of rules during the two seasons I increased my cash balance by 2000% and applied them when games were not going the way my criteria had predicted. By laying the draw, the worst case scenario will be for a game to finish in the exact scenario as I had hoped it would not. In other words, if the game Chelsea v QPR ends in a draw, I will lose my entire capital for that bet, which should
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be no more than 1/10th or 10% of my cash balance as per the formula discussed in the chapter ‘How Much Money to Place on Each Bet.’ But what if we could cap our losses by doing the following?:
Emerging Outcome
No goals scored One goal each
Action Taken
Cash out Cash out
Match Time
70th minute 70th minute
Likely +Profit/-Loss of Initial £10 bet (%)
-£5 (50%) -£6 (40%)
Let’s say your cash balance is £1000 and you have placed a £100 bet on a game which is now going against you. You will lose 10% of your cash balance if the final whistle blows or unless one of your favoured outcomes manifests and does so quickly. It’s approaching the 70th minute and the cash out option is offering you £35 of the initial £100 you placed on the game. What do you do? You cash out! So instead of losing £100, you lose £75 and add the £35 back to your cash balance. The smaller the losses, the quicker your cash balance shall grow overall.
This technique of minimising the size of the losses and protecting the overall cash balance is similar to the technique I apply in my day trading job. Having a stop loss in place – which activates and closes my position should the market go against me – saves me a lot of money and headache. For example, if I open a trade with the thinking
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that the price of gold will climb higher from the current price of £900 per ounce but in actual fact the price starts to drop, then by having a stop loss in place at the £890 per ounce level will close me out of that trade having only lost £10 per every ounce of gold I had bought. A stop loss prevents any trader from losing any significant amount of money or any more than they intend to.
Remember the all-important rule of being patient when intending to increase your cash balance over any timeframe. Try and avoid any emotions getting the better of you by making you feel you should double or quadruple your bet size for the next bet in order to make up for any loss you have encountered. Teams like QPR do not beat teams like Chelsea on their home turf very often so by simply continuing with the strategy, you shall make up any and all of the lost funds and then continue increasing your cash balance overall. Most people fail to execute the cash out option at the exact scenarios listed above because they are too emotionally directed and cannot understand or practice the concept that sometimes you need to take a small loss in order to make further and future gains overall. They rather just ‘hang on’ and see what happens.
How much of your initial stake you lose shall vary in accordance to the odds and match conditions related to each match. For example, the loss or running deficit shall be small if Chelsea are pressuring QPR and look likely to score a goal during a 0-0 match. The match time elapsed also has an
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effect on the cash out amount being offered at any given time. I found that the 70th minute was a good point to count your losses because once the match time reaches the 80th minute, your losses start increasing significantly.
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How I Made 1000% in Four Months, Twice
The purpose of this chapter is not to explain or summarise the exact mechanics of how I increased my Sports Trading cash balance by 2000% in two seasons because that is the topic of this entire book, and how I exactly achieved that financial gain is what has been laid out in all the previous chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to share with the reader the additional judgements, views and analysis which I had relied upon throughout those two successful periods.
It would be fair to assume that my research and analytical ability which had been enhanced by my trading profession significantly helped me develop and improve this Sports Trading strategy. At the very beginning, I would spend hours creating complicated spreadsheets and charts by using results from previous seasons to cross reference the different patterns over different seasons and parts of the same season for better statistical understanding. Anything I had not realised during my initial analysis was often later incorporated once I had experienced the same.
In my first Sports Trading season (2013–2014) during which I made my first 1000% profit, I had in fact exceeded this figure before Christmas 2014 – a remarkable feat considering I only started my objective in the second or third week of the English football season. I placed my first trade days after the start of the season because I had remembered from previous seasons how some top tier teams would have a disastrous
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start to the season and as a consequence would go on a run of defeats. By remembering the likelihood of this occurrence I wanted to avoid picking such a team and wait until a steady pattern was emerging in the league. In other words, I was very cautious throughout and gave considerable thought to each and every game I considered placing my money on. It had also dawned on me that some non-domineering teams had a tendency to start the season well but would later lose ground to the more domineering teams as the season progressed. This ‘start of the season reoccurring pattern’ saved me from many potential losses during both seasons.
Having successfully made large gains up until Christmas 2014, my wife and I decided to visit her family in California so my Sports Trading was placed on the back shelf until I returned some weeks later. During the time I had been away, the teams which were winning had started to drop points and even lose some games against opponents which my strategy regarded as non-domineering. This very same pattern occurred in the following 2014–2015 season and on both occasions continued until the end of the season but reduced in occurrence from April until the end of the season in May. Due to this, I placed the majority of my bets between August and December during both seasons.
At the very beginning, when I started off with a small cash balance and placed only small bets, I always had the tendency to count my winnings during real time cash out options in terms of percentages only. Even though on some
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occasions I was only going to win £50 from a £350 bet, I normally cashed out at the next suitable opportunity (with a smile on my face). This normally happened after a goal, because I regarded the 14%+ increase in my initial stake as a fantastic return for my ‘short-term’ investment. This in turn was one of the reasons why I increased my cash balance so rapidly and within four months during both seasons. Not being greedy ensured that when the opposition scored a goal, contrary to my favoured outcome, I had already made money from the match and cashed out. Once you cash out, the result no longer matters.
Once I had become comfortable with using the strategy in the English football league, I branched out to other leagues in Europe and even some international matches, but never friendlies. I also utilised the strategy with different sports including international rugby and cricket, and it worked.
One other important element of the strategy which I incorporated from my day trading technique was the ability to understand and apply the power of momentum (i.e. the current form of a team). How the team is currently performing is very important in deciding if you should consider that team to be fitting of the criteria. If a domineering team is placed in the Europa League qualification position but have lost their previous two games and drawn the prior, then I would not consider that team to be suitable for the criteria. Also, if a team which is normally regarded as a domineering club is not playing well and
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therefore placed towards the foot of the table, I will not bet against this team in any shape or form. The reasoning behind this is because big clubs with big money only ever play appallingly for a small period of time and can usually afford the right players and/or managers to turn their season around – sooner rather than later.
The biggest difference between me and many football fans is this. I do not support any team nor do I prefer one team to do better over another. I just love the game and when you love the game, you only want the best team to win, which is something fans of teams/clubs lose out on. Being able to enjoy any game is equivalent to a fan supporting and enjoying every team in the world. Can you imagine the fun that fan would have?
Sports Trading is not personal to me, I have no such misplaced allegiance, it is just business.
So how exactly do I make such fantastic gains with Sports Trading? Simple, I follow my strategy no matter what, never become greedy and use each game as an extra brick to my financial wall.
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How to offset losses
A few weeks after I wrote the first edition, Chelsea had finished the 2014/2015 as the English Premier League Champions. The following season, their manager Jose Mourinho was sacked due to (reportedly) a falling out with the players, staff and a series of bad results. It seemed to me that the players were possibly not performing in accordance to their abilities and thus allowing opposing teams to get the better of them. Now forgive me if I am wrong for asking this but if the Chelsea players did indeed allow this (and I am not saying they did), then could they have been participating in determining a result or scenario?!
Many Chelsea fans seemed to agree with this notion by holding banners up criticising those players which they deemed to have been the main culprits. And as if by magic, as soon as Jose was sacked by the club’s owner, the Chelsea team started to play just like they had before and climbed swiftly out of the relegation zone. I wonder how many bets were lost during that period?!
The same season as this was taking place, Leicester, a mid- table team at the best, went from a bunch of relegation non- fits to Premier League Champions in one season. Furthermore, as if by coincidence, the season after Leicester became Champions, the players seemed to mimic exactly what the Chelsea players had done in the season following their success in being crowned champions, by playing
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ridiculously poor up until their manager was sacked. And again like Chelsea, once the Leicester manager had been fired, the team started firing on all cylinders just as they had done so the season before.
Whether such reoccurring themes such as this means football is fixed or not is not the subject of this book, nor am I saying claiming that any Chelsea or Leicester football players have participated in any such activity, however, the point of me bring this up is as follows. For one reason or another weird things happen in football and blaming the players, teams, clubs, or whoever is pointless because the only one who enjoys these unusual happenings is the one entity who has positioned themselves to gain from such a situation – the bookies! The bookies win no matter what.
We shall now discuss two different strategies which you can consider using in different situations or when things go against you.
We shall assume the lay bet against the draw has been placed as follows;
Match:
Bet type:
Liability:
Winnings if successful:
Chelsea v QPR Lay Draw
£30
£10
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– Opposing Bets
So let’s assume we are approaching the 70th minute and the game is heading towards a stalemate and a goalless draw. Rather than cashing out and losing around £20 of your £30 liability, you could choose to back the draw with a £20 stake and off-set the losses that way.
Let’s assume that on the 70th minute, for a £20 stake in favour of a draw will earn you £15 in winnings. So by applying this bet, you are reducing your £20 loss (if you cashed out) to £15 overall (if you left both your bets running).
Alternatively, you could be ultra-smart and pre-open a second betting account with a second betting company for the purpose of such occasions and place a bet in favour of the draw in the 70th.
What this strategy allows you to do is lock in your losses at a certain level and though placing an opposite bet with same account will allow you to cash out overall on your all your liabilities, a separate account with a separate service provider will allow you to cash out individually on each bet. Placing the opposing bet on a separate account with a different service provider will also allow you to use the cash out feature should Chelsea score (for example) late in the game and therefore change your stance in terms of your favoured outcome.
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It should be noted that this strategy is not ideal to use in an attempt to eclipse loses from one bet to the other. Due to how odds change during match time, this strategy is more easily utilised in an attempt to limit losses and it should be noted that different games and different scenarios will throw up different odds and different service providers will have differential levels of liquidity available to traders and therefore limited levels of cash out features could be applicable.
A final point on this technique is this. The second opposing bet should not cost you more than you are going to lose with your liability on the other lay bet. This is because many goals are scored late in any game and in order to factor in this possibility, we must not place a bet in attempt to make back all of the £30 as it could end up with us losing even more. Once an opposing bet is placed, you could lose either bet right up until the final whistle, so by ensuring the bet placed in favour of the draw is no more than £30 (the same amount of your liability in the lay bet) ensures your losses are no more than the sum difference £30 liability of the lay bet and whatever gains we make from the second opposing bet.
On rare occasions when dominating teams are playing non- dominating teams, the odds can change in such a way that you will make more money from the opposing bet than you lose from the lay bet, however, the objective is not to do this from the offset as you will lose more than you gain overall in your attempts to play the odds with this technique.
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To incorporate this technique into the strategy, I strongly suggest you practise with as many games and scenarios as possible and with different service providers. We must all practise because one day we may have big money riding on a game and in order to steer out of a tricky situation we must act with our heads and not with our hearts – and we do that by sticking to a strategy.
This technique is no different to how many traders of financial products off-set their losses late into a trade by buying opposing products to their original trade. For example, traders who take a large position on gold expecting the price to go higher should North Korea manage to fire a missile towards the US may place 80% of their trading balance on gold to climb higher. Once the traders realise that North Korea hasn’t even developed its own car engine let alone a GPS accurate missile system then they may use the remaining 20% to buy the US Dollar because when gold goes up, the US Dollar tends comes down and vice versa. So whatever the price difference is between the gold price and the US Dollar, that price shall be locked in. The same technique can also be applied to lock in profits of successful running trades.
– Sacrificial bets
The technique we will now discuss should be applied ‘before’ the start of the game only and as earliest as possible. The reason being is that this technique requires placing multiple
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bets but only for those matches which have the suitable odds and since games which are live (in-play) can have rapidly changing odds, this method can go horribly wrong unless your service provider allows you to place the lay bet and these ‘sacrificial bets’ simultaneously. Let me explain.
Sticking with our Chelsea v QPR example bet, we are using the same liability of £30 in order to make £10 in profit. However, in this technique, we will now be sacrificing part of our £10 potential winnings in order to either ‘guarantee’ we win no matter what or limit any losses to the bare ‘minimum’. Which of these two you are able secure will depend on the odds available and/or how early you are placing the bets before kick-off. Sometimes, placing a bet a day earlier or even earlier than that can help you tremendously. Alternatively, it can be prudent to come back later in the same day or just before kick-off to check if the odds are more in your favour due to various changes. Like the ‘Opposing Bet’ technique, this technique can also be utilised on the same betting account as your lay bet is placed or a separate account entirely.
What we do is place multiple bets in favour of an exact outcome but all different outcomes predicting the score. For example, we place the following bets.
Predicted outcome Stake Profit
0-0 £2
£35
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1-1 £2 £27 2-2 £2 £30 TOTAL £6
(Odds used in this table are approximate)
Now because we are placing bets in favour on an exact outcome from a number of different possible outcomes, the odds are very high but by using this technique we are not expecting any of these outcomes to happen. What we are doing is we are taking the future likely winnings of £10, using £6 of it to ensure we either limit our losses or exceed our initial capital overall depending on the outcome. Yes, should Chelsea or QPR win, our overall winnings will be £10 minus £6 = £4 however, £4 made from our initial £30 lay bet is +13.33% profit and the last time I checked, that is still higher than the interest of nearly any central bank around the world.
The formula for this technique can be changed to suit your requirements and initial stake or liability. For example, a higher liability amount on the lay bet will mean your stake in the predicted outcomes will also need to increase in accordance to match the losses.
It is very important to note that in ‘unusual’ circumstances, things can still go against you with this technique. For example, a team like Chelsea may throw their toys out of
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their pram when taking a disliking to their manager and increase the likelihood of an outcome such as a 3-3 draw or 4-4 draw. Obviously, to combat such rare occasions such you could opt to include the 3-3 and 4-4 results but then you would also need to increase your lay bet liability so that your winnings are higher in the most likely scenario (a dominating team beating a non-dominating team in their home ground) than your losses are in the least likely outcomes (a draw). However, the likelihood of a team like QPR scoring 3 or 4 goals past a team like Chelsea even when they are playing poorly is very small and by just observing how the team is performing in the league or what the latest news from the club states about the health of team should prevent you from placing a bet in such a game where the outcome is questionable. I do recall from previous seasons that two top tier teams playing each other such as Man City v Spurs were more likely to score multiple goals against each other rather than a non-dominating team playing one of the dominating teams.
Furthermore, if a given match did turn into a high scoring match with some irregularities, then the cash out feature can always be utilised to either cash out in profit or in a small deficit. It is better to be safe than sorry.
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Checklist
This checklist has been created for the readers of the book. It is important for you (and your bank balance) to have read and fully understood the strategy explained in the book.
You must be able to answer YES to all of the following
– Is your chosen Sport a major domestic and worldwide favourite of the masses?
– Does the domestic league of your choosing have a cluster of domineering teams which tend to compete in a larger continental league i.e. Champions League on a regular basis?
– Does the match of your choosing equate to the following scenario?
A Domineering club (on form and playing in their home ground) v Non-Domineering club (not playing well and playing away)
– Is the Domineering club placed at the top or towards the top of its domestic league?
– Is the Non-Domineering club placed at the bottom or towards the bottom of its domestic league?
– Are you placing a lay bet (if applicable) against the draw?
– Does your preferred online betting company provide the cash out facility?
– Have you calculated your betting amount (how much to money to place on each bet) in accordance to the formula in the book?
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What will do put into action when things go against your trade?
– Cash out at the 70th minute and count your losses?
– Calculate the suitability of an opposing bet and apply
if suitable?
– Use a collection sacrificial bets to favour certain
outcomes in an attempt to prevent or limit losses (to be applied before kick-off)?
If you have read and understood the book, the probabilities should be in your favour.
Good Luck.
Please turn over to read the disclaimer.
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Disclaimer
The information in this book or any related product, service and internet site is provided for information purposes only. The information is not intended to be and does not constitute financial or gambling advice or any other advice. It is general in nature and not specific to you. Before using the strategy contained within this book, you should seek suitable professional advice and/or undertake your own due diligence and/or consider the negatives of betting and/or gambling. None of the information in this book or any related product, service or internet site is intended as investment, betting or gambling advice, an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy, sell or gamble, or as a recommendation, endorsement, or sponsorship of any product, technique, business or team. The author, publisher or representing company is not responsible for any investment, gambling or any decision you make based on information contained in this book or any related product, service and internet site. You are responsible for your own decisions and research.
Copyright Sinder Ltd 2017
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Other books by Manny Sinder
– Blue Gold – The Commoditisation of Water
– Quote to Change Your Life – The Most Complete Collection of Quotes
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