If you are a keen football punter then no doubt you’ll have sifted through multitudes of online soccer tipping websites to see what services are out there. Frankly, it’s difficult to avoid misleading terms such as ‘sure bet,’ ‘banker,’ ‘dead cert’ or ‘guaranteed winner.’ Many tipsters actually incorporate these terms into the URL of their sites in the hope of increasing the number of sign ups. As a punter and tipster this hugely frustrates me. Without opening up the cans of worms that are the laws of mathematics and statistics, the simple indisputable fact is that there is no such thing as a sure outcome in soccer, or sport. If a dead cert outcome did exist there would be no bookmakers in business to cover our bets. Sometimes I read the introductory few paragraphs which insist that the professional tipster possesses a unique secret method for picking guaranteed winners. I believe that it should be illegal to make such misleading claims.
Having more than 20 years of trials and tribulations as a football or ‘soccer’ punter, I can categorically tell you that the whole notion of a dead cert is not only false, but is in itself a contradiction. If the outcome of a particular soccer match was a guarantee, then surely there would be no need for the teams to do battle for ninety minutes. Also, bookmakers would be clinically insane to cover bets on a game whose result was a certainty. I realise that I’m possibly being facetious in my last few sentences, but it’s scary to note the amount of reasonably intelligent people that will believe anything that’s written in print by a so-called ‘expert’.
When I began providing tips to the public via my website, I incorporated a ‘Banker Section’ every week. Now, the idea of this section was to suggest that, having done hours of research and analysis on various games, I really couldn’t see any other outcome than, for example, a home win. If a game from the Banker Section resulted in a shock outcome, I’d suffer as both a tipster and a punter. It effectively made my tipping skills seem incompetent to some my members, not to mention I’d also have personally had a sizable bet on the game. Two games still stick in my mind and bring back uncomfortable memories.
April 10 2010, Scottish Cup: Glasgow Celtic 0 – 2 Ross County.
Premier League giants Celtic were unceremoniously dumped out of the cup by First Division side Ross County, completing one of the biggest upsets in Scottish football history. Many soccer accumulator or multi-bets were subsequently torn up in disgust by outraged punters.
February 21 2010, Dutch League: PSV Eindhoven 1 – 1 Sparta Rotterdam.
This game had been priced as low as 1.09 by bookmakers for a home win, such was the ‘certainty’ of the outcome. PSV had won eleven league games in a row in Eindhoven and were facing a Sparta side who had already lost twelve of their away games that season, and who also went on to be relegated. To add insult to injury, Sparta scored their equalizing goal three minutes into injury time.
Huge upset results like these obviously ruin accumulator bets, but more significantly they highlight the fact that you can never ever be certain about the outcome of a soccer bet.