Bookmakers - how to use their wide market focus against them

Bookmakers and their operations have developed tremendously since the online revolution. This is a long story, and a bit outside the scope here, so we will save this one for later. Back in 1995 you were limited to very few bookies, and the betting offers they had were all focused on the biggest sports and leagues. The bookmakers betting offers were usually distributed by fax or snail mail. Online bookmakers today can reach tens of millions punters with a few clicks on their keyboards. It used to be product guys like us running the show, nowadays it is Harvard MBAs and the likes. That is probably very good for business, but it opens up a few interesting betting possibilities.

Bookmakers and their expanding bet offers

As listed bookmakers need to grow in order to deserve their valuations on the world's stock exchanges new markets must be entered in rapid succession. New signups and depositors is the tune they hum to. Their marketing desks work in overdrive modus to fulfill or beat the promises in the chairman's predictions. Their non-listed competitors are also entering new markets to gain new market share. At the end of the day, the punter likes to have a wide selection of available bets. Not that people really bet it, most of the turnover by far is on the high profile and rather obvious sports and their most profiled leagues.

With these market entries in uncharted territory come a lot of new betting offers for us punters to consider. A Swedish controlled bookmaker with its operations in Malta may want to enter Peru or Uruguay. They may even hire local expertise to cover the volume of new markets needed. When one of the old and proud British bookmakers goes to Scandinavia they need to widen their bet offerings and offer obscurities such as winter sports. Again, all the possibilities that open up are mouthwatering.

Bookmakers - how to exploit their focus on many betting offers

First and foremost: Go local. Find out as much as possible about things they cover in your home country. You can read the news in your own language; you can perhaps find information on relevant websites such as the athletes twitter account or the soccer clubs homepage. You can even call to the clubs or athletes to ask specific information. We at Howtobet.net have done that since the mid-nineties ourselves and we have been surprised about how much information many clubs, athletes, referees, coaches and others have been willing to share with us. Obviously if you are Norwegian it is easier to find 2nd division soccer information at the local level rather than if you were a London based million pounds per bet punter.

Secondly: dig deep. Learn how to analyze sports that is not top level. For instance, if you are a German punter; why focus on the Bundesliga? The second highest level is probably not even interesting either. Too much information is available to the bookmakers. Most likely they have skilled people hired to look after it as well.  Go for the regional leagues. For most of us you can still get decent money on betting those leagues. Most likely the employees of the bookmaker operation are not so focused on this as all the turnover comes in on the top leagues. At least they will very often in our experience be less pro-active.

Also, the odds of those lower leagues and sports are often blindly copied from the market leader in that territory by junior odds compilers of competing bookmakers. When the odds moves, they often get caught with more than one hand out of the cookie jar and professional punters are 1-0 up. Find out who the market leaders are, and exploit the odds moves at other less fortunate books. Then use trading strategies to set your exposure level financially (more about this in another article).

Form teams: Get friends in other markets and trade your local information. Just make sure you don't bet at the same time and don’t use max stakes all the time. You can easily be deemed a betting syndicate, and bookmakers will quickly limit your betting stakes to next to nothing. We have limited more than one professional punter in our time, and we have been limited ourselves even more so.

If you go for this approach it is important to have accounts with a wide range of bookmakers so you can vary who the victim of your betting knowledge will be. If you keep stabbing at any one bookmaker, he will limit you sooner or later. Therefore, we suggest you sign up using the links in our bookmaker review section. Those are bookmakers we believe to be better than the field and are bookmakers that will stand the test of time. At the very least, read our reviews and do your own due diligence.

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