Summer Loving Part 4 – Summer League Betting in Practice
Hopefully, by now you have already gained an understanding of the leagues you need to search for, along with the requisite resources. As you become more adept at finding potential betting opportunities, you will doubtless come across the same obstacles as I did.
The main one is finding the games on a bookmaker’s website. I don’t know if it is deliberate or not, but they make it incredibly difficult to find some games. Then you have the utter frustration of watching as the bookie suspends betting for several minutes and invariably, the team you wanted to back score three times during that spell!
Patience is an essential component of betting on obscure leagues, and you may need some free time to do it because most bookmakers only offer very limited markets (if they offer any at all) pre-kick-off. I understand that not everyone will have the chance to bet on the Estonian Cup because they are working at 5 pm!
All I can say to that is do your best and bet on any value markets you find. In my pomp, before a couple of dozen restrictions clipped my wings, I had multiple accounts and five or six tabs open at once waiting for games. Again, many of you won’t have that option, so it is best to open an account with Bet365 when in doubt because it offers more obscure games than most.
It should go without saying that you should only bet what you can afford; even the most promising games can go sideways for various reasons. I find that poor finishing is often costly, and it is a chance you take because players at this level of football are very poor. It is no exaggeration to say I could play for most of the teams I bet on!
Without further ado, here are a few examples of wins in summer leagues from a couple of months ago.
Winning Bets
The Australian FFA Cup preliminary rounds can be a goldmine although the spectre of poor finishing, teams being half-arsed, or simply being crap on the day, can always hurt you badly. One game which caught my attention was Hills Brumbies of the New South Wales NPL Second Division which I believe is the third tier of Australian football.
If you think this means they are half-decent, you’re wrong! There is a HUGE gap in quality between the first and second tiers and the second and third tiers. The A-League contains the nation’s professional sides while everyone else is a country mile behind in quality.
The rest of Australian football is divided into territories such as Queensland, NSW, and Victoria. There is a second NPL division for each territory, followed by various state leagues. As it happens, the gap between the third tier and wherever Putney Rangers were on the league pyramid is also massive. I checked the fourth tier, and there was no sign of them.
It was clear that Putney is not a good side, but even so, I waited for the match to begin in-play and elected to monitor it as I wrote. Hills scored early, and I could sense a walloping was about to take place; so, I put my money where my mouth was. Restrictions on 32Bet limited what I could do there, but 10Bet was available to take the slack.
It was 4-0 at half-time, and then the floodgates really opened:
Putney cheekily pulled a goal back to make it 8-1 but that seemingly angered Hills who ran riot at the end to run out 12-1 winners. The bookies had Hills at 6/5 on a -4 handicap when the game was 1-0; a regular case of them getting it badly wrong on obscure matches.
I had even more bets than what I have shown above; my profit was over £400 in total. This included several in-play bets. That is one major advantage of summer leagues: When you get farcical scorelines like the one above, you can continue winning in-play if the bookies don’t adjust their odds accordingly; something which happens frequently.
You may have noticed winning bets on a match between the Brisbane Strikers and Souths United on one of the betting slips above. It was one of a series of winners on this particular match. I made several bets right at the beginning because I was confident of a good result, along with a few in-plays. All told, my total profit on this game was over £600.
This had all the hallmarks of a mismatch because Brisbane is in the Queensland NPL while Souths is in the Queensland Premier League, a level below. As I mentioned, the gap in quality is enormous as this match showed. If you wish to be cautious in this kind of match, monitor the game in-play to see if the superior team has turned up. If they are heavily dominant during the early exchanges, it is usually a good sign.
I was able to get odds of almost 10/1 on Brisbane scoring seven goals. They were well above even money to score four or more which I knew was a major bookie blunder. Incidentally, always bet on team and match goals if you can. I bet on handicaps when there is nothing else available but all it takes is one goal to screw everything up.
I have included my winning bets from this game in screenshots below.
