Google ‘inplay football strategies’ and you’ll be inundated with everything from the unbelievable to the I-can’t-believe-people-would-fall-for-it to shady snake oil salesmen and to YouTube videos where the maths just don’t add up and to websites that are obviously taking punters for a ride. It’s become almost impossible to tell the genuine people from the shysters, but there are a few ways to spot the good ones.

One way is if you see that the information provided is based on statistics, just like us here at Bet Dynamo, everything we do here is based on reliable football stats. Another way is to see if a website has a Profit and Loss page or publically-available spreadsheet with results. We do this too, but don’t be shy about asking other outlets for this information. If someone isn’t keeping records then you can be pretty sure that the reason is because their record is muck.

Anyway, today we want to write about a popular inplay football betting strategy and its pitfalls. It’s a very simple strategy and its doesn’t rely on you having access to a Betting Exchange such as Betfair or Matchbook, like many other popular inplay football strategies require. It’s basically a ‘system’ where you bet on Under 2.5 goals and if things go wrong, you either take the hit or continue to bet.

What is the Martingale System?

We’re written before about the ‘Martingale’ Betting system here. It’s by far the worst staking system on the planet and while it may bring some success it the long term it has been shown to only lead to losses and those losses can be huge.

Let’s pick a match from this weekend’s Premier League action; Everton vs Chelsea and have a look at the Over/Under 2.5 goals markets. As you can see from the image, the highest odds for Over 2.5 goals is 1.75, the highest for Under 2.5 goals is 2.22.

Around 55% of Premier League football matches end with Over 2.5 goals occurring. However, for the early kick offs it is far less. Now, we’re not going to fib to you here, we found contrasting figures and couldn’t verify them, but for the early Saturday kickoff the tendency for a match ending with Over 2.5 goals is between 41-48% depending on your source.

Betting with Statistics

But anyway, we’re just talking in examples here so it doesn’t really matter, what matters is that Under 2.5 goals happens more often in the early kickoffs than in later matches and there can be a multitude of reasons for it but we don’t need to go into them here. Armed with this knowledge you look at the Bet Dynamo Insights Page and see there’s no value in Over 2.5 goals whatsoever and decide to bet £10 on Under 2.5 goals at odds of 2.22.

Now, if the match is a drab 0-0 your bet wins easily and you’re laughing. But what do you do if Brazilain attacker Richarlison opens the scoring after 15 minutes for the home side? This will really upset the odds because the market will react and back Chelsea to come back and win the match and they’ll also heavily back Over 2.5 goals as well. Your bet looks dead in the water, but you have some options.

1) You can wait it out and hope that either nobody scores again, or that only one more goal will be scored, or 2) you can back Under 3.5 goals for another £10 because so early in the match the odds will be around the 2.22, or maybe even higher.

Over/Under 2.5 Goals Betting Strategy

Halftime comes and it remains 1-0 to the home team. You might win both bets here so long as only one more goal is scored. But just after the restart Chelsea get one back and it’s 1-1, your Under 2.5 bet is in big trouble and your Under 3.5 goals is looking bad now too. So you martingale it and double up and place a bet of £20 on Under 4.5 goals at 2.11 because you think you’re going to lose the other two bets and want to finish with around what you started with.

Now you’re £40 into a match that you had only invested £10 in at kickoff. At 75 minutes it goes 1-2 to Chelsea, you’re Under 2.5 bet is gone and that £10 is lost, your Under 3.5 goals is looking bad and the odds on your Under 4.5 goals is looking bad too. You look at Under 5.5 goals, but the odds are bad, there’s only 15 minutes left in the match and the market isn’t expecting many more goals. You’re into this match for £40, with £10 lost already and you might lose more.

At 89 minutes, Everton get an equaliser and your Under 3.5 goals bet is lost. You’re practically praying that no more goals will be scored and finally your luck changes, no more goals are scored and while you lost your Under 2.5 and Under 3.5 bets, your inplay Under 4.5 goals bet did win so you finish with more or less the same bank as you had at the start of the match, was it worth it?

If we use stakes of £10, how big does our betting bank need to be, have a look at the image below:

The Martingale staking system is incredibly risky and as you can see you need a massive bank to be able to chase your losses and while it can be done, in football matches we also need to factor in time decay, that is, how long is left in a match. As time ticks down less and less bettors are willing to enter the market and even though the highest percentage of goals in football matches are scored between 85 minutes and full time the likelihood of being able to enter a new Over/Under market to recover losses when a goal is scored so late on is pretty low and many bookmakers won’t even open a new Over/Under market so late in a match.

This is an incredibly risky inplay betting system that can work but you need to know the risks involved. The Martingale system can work, but you need a massive bank for it to work and really you’d have caused yourself far less stress if you’d taken the loss and moved onto the next football match.