Article: Top Strategies to Improve your Football Accumulators Revealed

Today, you can wager on football in all four corners of the world on desktop, tablet, and smartphone, Photo by kaboompics, Public Domain

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There is nothing more frustrating than losing football accumulators week after week. Many football fans around the world spend hours on a Friday evening or Saturday morning combing through the weekend’s fixture list in search of the golden ticket to winning accumulator paradise. For accumulator punters, landing that massive payout is what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter whether you guessed five out of six selections correctly and only one let you down, all you are interested in is extracting massive profits from the bookies; we hear you.
If you are keen to improve your strike rate on football accumulators, you’ve come to the right place. Over the years, we’ve gleaned much about the football betting markets that can help give punters a decent shot at winning on accumulators over the long-term. Here are our five top strategies to help you take a different approach to “accas”:

Avoid including short-priced favorites

The initial temptation with any football accumulator is to head straight to the games involving the top sides that are priced at very short odds to win. Unfortunately, there is often a short-priced favorite in the match list that almost always tends to let an acca down. Very few short-priced odds are “value” selections. Instead, you should study form tables as closely as possible to find in-form teams against weak opposition.

Try to specialize in “niche” football leagues to find value

It’s hard to find “value” bets for accas in Europe’s top leagues. Photo by Eurobettingtips, Public Domain

The leading online sportsbooks have in-house football traders that have an encyclopedic knowledge of the top leagues in Europe. This means that most odds in the biggest leagues like the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, and the Bundesliga are very efficient. What do we mean by efficient? The prices for each team have been modelled on up-to-the-minute data based on each team’s recent games and their previous meetings. If you want to find odds where certain teams may have been undervalued, you’ll need to delve deeper into the lower leagues – or countries where football isn’t so popular, like the USA. If you have a reasonable knowledge of non-league football, for example, you might be able to find some appealing odds, perhaps based on team news that you are aware of which hasn’t been made public yet.

Consider ditching match odds markets for both teams to score markets

One of the best ways to improve your accumulator strike rate is to focus solely on both teams to score markets, as opposed to correctly predicting the full-time result. You can wager on both teams to score ‘yes’ and ‘no’ markets, depending on whether you think the attack of both teams is capable of finding the net at least once. These accas, which are known as goals galore selections among some sportsbooks, tend to be easier for those getting introduced to this world.

Use a sliding scale for your accumulator stake based on the overall odds

If you want any football betting strategy to be profitable long-term, you must consider the relationship between the size of your stake and the combined odds of your accumulator selections. Whenever you are betting with longer odds at stake, be sure to scale down the size of your wager, saving your biggest stakes for the accumulators that have the smaller payouts and you are most confident about. Statistically, the higher-priced accas will win fewer times than lower-priced accas with slightly fewer selections, so you need to preserve your bankroll by limiting your losses. Look up the Kelly Criterion betting concept when you have some time.

Extract the maximum value from your accas using bookie promos

Last but by no means least, the best way to optimize your football accumulators is to use bookies that offer acca bonuses. For example, there are a growing number of sportsbooks that will now refund your stake if just one selection lets your entire accumulator down. Over the long-term, that’s a significant sum of money saved for your bankroll. It’s even possible to find sportsbooks that will boost your winnings if you win an accumulator with a set number of successful selections.

To win at football betting you have to go against the majority most of the time. Think outside of the box and find alternative matches and markets that can help yield more consistent wins.

By John Lewis