That investment might be time or it might be money, but if you want to be super successful you do have to invest in that success. When you stop believing you are going to find a magic pill that will make you instantly rich then you will start on the road to success.

As an example I was talking to a very successful gambler the other day and we got to talking about betting the greyhounds, which I used to do full time in the days before betfair.

It turns out that my method then is still being used by this same guy. Basically what I would do is to buy the videos of every race run, which I think was £10 per meeting at that time. I would then spend hours studying those videos looking for dogs that lost time in running and then with that data calculate an expected time for every dog should it get a clear run. Now I’m obviosly making this sound much simpler than it is because there is also a lot of analysis of where a dog will run from a given trap and how that will effect other runners and endless records to be kept on the past performance of each dog.

But the point is that I invested time and money and because so few others did this I had an advantage and even when fighting against bookmaker overrounds of 130% + I could still make a living.

Now in this age of the betting exchange where we bet against the judgement of our fellow gamblers you just have to be better than the other guy. And with 1 and 2% overrounds you only need a small advantage to make it pay!

After the initial bullishness usually one of two things happen.

They either disappear to never be heard from again or the ones that are more committed come back to tell me how they learned their lesson.

The lesson is that if you are not striking a value bet you will lose in the long run and if you are laying at 100.0 on a 34.0 chance then sooner or later you will lay a winner and at those prices the unprepared will lose their bank.

I read a little factoid the other day which I thought illustrated this well.

Back in 1962 a guy called into the head quarters of William Hill and asked for odds on a human being walking on the surface of the moon before 1970.

He was quoted 1,000/1 and placed a £10 bet which was more than a weeks wages. The rest as they say is history.

The lesson is that 1,000/1 shots can win and that you should always have the value on your side and have a bank that will cope with a losing bet even when you think its impossible to lose.

This man could watch a horse race and know if it was giving 100%, know if the jockey was using it’s full capability and could assess how good it really was.

He can analyse a race inside out and find nailed on winners at crazy prizes, this is a man who can find winners at 33/1 without the benefit of inside knowledge!

The flaw though is one of confidence, reality and pressure. Which all boil down to psychology.

The most important skill that any bettor needs, (more important than the ability to find winning bets in my opinion) is the strength of mind to cope with losing runs and just as importantly the strength to cope with winning runs.

My rules for betting success (and life!) are…

- Don’t give up. If you keep moving on to something new every time you hit a glitch then you will never reach the winning line. It’s like setting out from Birmingham to London and when half way there deciding that Newcastle sounds better and then as you pass Scotch Corner deciding that Manchester is the place for you. You’re just wasting time if you change your strategy every day, week or month! Which is ok if you are just looking for entertainment but not ok if you plan to make money.

- Don’t get too excited when you have a winning run. You are not invincible, however good you are fate will deal out your share of losing runs and winning runs. Know that and know how big each is likely to be.

- Tell nobody how you’re doing. It is hard on relationships to not talk about how your day has been and maybe there is a middle ground on this. But my rule is to never tell anybody whether my day has been good or bad. I try hard to find something good about even the worst day (maybe I’ve learned that I can take more losers than I ever imagined) so I can go indoors and say it’s been a good day. If you take your loved ones on a roller coaster of highs and lows with you the pressure is doubled. Don’t do it.

- Don’t aim too high. Slow and sure wins the race. When I meet a new budding gambler who plans to make his fortune this month or this year I know that he won’t make it big anytime soon, play the long game.

To go back to the genius, he is in his 60’s now and finally seems to have gotten his head together to make consistent profits, he never gave up! I hope that you achieve the same.

Laying is a great way to make money and an opportunity we didn’t have in the hard days of my betting youth but that doesn’t mean that it is easy and that you don’t have to be careful.

I don’t want to put you off of laying as a betting method but in this article I want to just point out some facts that you need to keep in mind when planning your laying strategy.

The first myth that you will hear about often is that bookmakers don’t lose and therefore if you act like the bookmaker, by laying, that you will win also.

The fact is that bookmakers can lay with an overround (Built in profit factor) of between 8% and 30% depending on the sport. You can lay with an overround of about 0.5%. And that’s if you ask for a price, if you take the price available on Betfair then your locked in profit factor is – 0.5% (IE If you lay random selections then over the long term you will lose 0.5% of your turnover, ouch!).

The second trap that the new layer may fall into is that of the long winning run. For example if you are laying selections at 10/1 + you can go for long runs without any of your layed horses winning. This gives the impression that you can’t lose.

But if you hit a 10/1 winner you need to lay another 10 losers to be even. If you get 2 that win in the same day your bank can take a serious hit, which brings me to my final point today.

You need a bank to cover the worst possible run. So if you hit 2 big winners close together you still have enough money available to carry out your planned bets. There are simple calculations that you can perform to work out some worst case scenarios regarding your betting losing runs (Find these in the www.betting-school.com members area) and you should make these calculations and know that the worst case will happen at some time in your betting career. Be prepared.

More people fail with their betting because they are under funded than any other reason!

Seeing the Tote / Racing Post Ten to Follow competition (which is worth getting involved with if you know your horses www.betting-school.com/ttf) made me think that a different approach may also work.

This is all just an idea at the moment but I thought I would share it to see what others might think.

So the idea is that instead of following a set of systems we somehow follow a portfolio of horses, or football players or golfers or anything else.

So like an investor in the stock market would buy a selection of promising shares we would identify horses or sportsman that we think have potential to do well and we follow their form closely and bet them when the opportunity arises.

The thing is it’s no good adding anybody that’s already super successful to your portfolio, because all the value has gone. For example betting that Ronaldo will score in any given Man U game is not likely to be a value bet. What we have to do is to identify our selection before rest of the world jumps on the bandwagon.

The benefit of focusing on a handful of selections and following them is that we get to know more about our portfolio and can learn when they do well and when they are less likely to perform.

Finally do think about having a go at the Ten to Follow for £10 you get a good few months of fun and involvement with the possibility of a huge win at the end and along the way.

Darren Power is the Editor of the Betting School Insiders Report you can register for a free sample issue Click Here

This is the question on my mind this morning, having just read an article which proposes that we look for consensus naps to back. IE when two tipsters make the same selection there best win bet of the day we should bet it to win.

There was a time when I would have considered this a good strategy, but that was before I had a good understanding of value and market forces.

The answer to the question is not straightforward, which unfortunately is often the case!

If The Sun newspaper naps a selection you can be sure that there will be a lot of people betting that horse. If it is also napped by the Racing Post then a whole lot more people will be considering it as a bet also. What this means is that the horse will be overbet and market forces will cause the price to shorten.

It’s just simple supply and demand if everybody wants to buy something the price goes up. Like the housing market when huge mortgages are easy to come by, the price of a house goes up because for every house there is competition to buy it. Now we have a credit squeeze on there are not so many buyers so the seller has to reduce their price in order to make the sale.

In betting to win, the equivalent of the price going up is that the prices shorten EG your 2/1 shot is suddenly only available at 6/4. If it has a one in three chance then it is now bad value and is a bad bet, whether it wins or loses, because over the long term at level stakes you will lose if you back horses with a one in three chance at odds of less than 2/1. Fact.

Win @ 6/4 = +1.5
Lose @6/4 = -1
Lose @6/4 = -1

Grand Total = - 0.5

So to get back to the opening question the answer is that if you have access to a couple of unknown but good tipsters and they both nap a selection and the rest of the world doesn’t, then it is likely that you are onto a value bet.

On the other hand if two well known and popular tipsters nap the same selection, then you might want to look closer at the selection with a view to laying it to lose, it is unlikley that the selection will start at a value price.

If you are at all serious about your betting you have to make allowances for this fact and diversify your betting interests. Or better still have other income streams which compliment your betting profits. Just to go off track for a minute, it’s not a bad idea to keep some sort of job just for mental and social reasons. Sitting in front of TV’s and PC’s all day can send you a little crazy and increases feelings of isolation. Keeping a job will force you to get out and speak to other real people!

Let’s get back to the main message of this article which is that you need to diversify your betting. That way when one system or method has a bad month you still have income from your other systems.

Ideally you want to diversify across sports. So for example if the weather is bad, heavy rain etc, you will probably find that your selection methods for horse racing are impacted. If you also bet on sports, particularly indoor sports, you will find that these are not impacted by the same factor IE the weather.

If you cannot diversify across sports then as a minimum you should diversify your types of selection methods. Let’s look at a simple example, let’s say that you are betting on a number of horse racing systems that all lay the favourite. Each may have additional rules and may work well independently. But if there is a run of four or five winning favourites your profits will be impacted across all the systems.

So diversify across sports if you can, but at the very least don’t have your whole portfolio of systems based on one factor.

However my eyes have been opened to the potential of the multiple or exotic bet recently by some of the articles written by the expert writers of the Betting School Insiders Report.

Particularly Michael Wilding and Tony Gibson, both of whom are professional gamblers in their own right.

In particular my eyes have been opened to the occasional value that is available from the Exacta. This is the bet where you have to name the first two home in the correct order. I haven’t played with this type of bet since my early betting days at the greyhound track where the track tote and the Exacta and Trifecta were my bets when I didn’t have a clear opinion about a race!

I’ve just read a piece submitted by Michael where he details the calculation for working out how much value if any is available in your Exacta or your combination of Exacta’s.

To succeed you need to create your own oddsline or use one created for you (we covered this in an earlier issue and the lesson is available in our members area). Then you just use the forecast odds in a simple calculation to see how much value you can obtain. When the odds are good you have a bet.

Full details are in our members area

Making a substantial amount of income from sports betting myself, I would like to try and guide you in how you can become a professional sports bettor. It doesn’t matter if you want to do it only at weekends or holidays. If you are a professional you will always make money in the long-term.

So how can we make you money from betting. Listed below are some of the main factors that contribute to being a professional

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