Tuesday saw the release of our 2019/20 Season Football Tipster Guide – featuring our take on 16 of the very best football tipsters to follow this season.
Designed to help you find genuine, proven experts to follow in this season – its the perfect antidote to all the ‘predictions’ written by ex professional footballers or journalists with no background or experience in what it takes to make a profit football betting.
Playing football is one thing – betting on it another thing entirely!
One man who does know how to make a profit football betting is the very highly rated expert – Greg Gordon, who since 2006 has run a very profitable tipping service advising bets across a range of major English, Scottish & European leagues.
Greg was one of the experts featured within our 2019/20 Football Tipster Guide and alongside our detailed analysis on his performance, we also grilled him on the current state of play football betting as he saw it.
As a peek behind the curtain on what you can expect to find in the 2019/20 Football Tipster Guide, in this article you can read his interview in full.
We asked him about his performance last season, his thoughts on modern day football betting, the bookmakers & exchanges he uses PLUS his top advice for aspiring football punters.
As Greg also outlines, Smart Betting Club members can save a whopping £100 on the cost of joining his expert service – all thanks to our independent punter-first setup, where you pocket savings not us!
Sign-up for the Smart Betting Club.
Interview With Greg Gordon – As Taken From The 2019/20 Season Football Tipster Guide
SBC: Can you talk us through your tipping performance during the 2018/19 season and what you achieved overall?
Greg: At the end of each season, I always go back to first principles and I look at the season as a whole, before breaking it down into its constituent parts and its particular themes.
The first thing I’d say is that I am always happy to take a profit.
A profit of 20+ points is respectable enough. So is an ROI of 5.28%. With fees of £275 (with the £100 SBC discount applied) a return of £2,000 for an outlay of £275 is not to be sniffed at when compared to other places you could put your money for 10 months.
So big picture is OK. Not as good as last season, where I made a 44.37pts profit at an ROI of 14.84% – but not bad by any means.
Last season, your return would have been £4437 for the £275 outlay and adding the last 2 seasons together, that’s a £6437 profit for a £550 outlay.
Adding the last 2 seasons together, that’s a £6437 profit for a £550 outlay.
During the 18/19 season, we were prisoners of where the results fell and that is basically an occupational hazard in any betting endeavour.
Those that joined in the second half of the season will have had poor results and perhaps even a negative impression of the service. But the season as a whole was good, just as the previous seven seasons have been good.
Over the past 7 seasons I have averaged a profit of 31 points each season at a ROI of between 7 and 8%. Some seasons this figure is slightly higher and some slightly lower but I take strength from the fact my advice consistently beats the bookmaker.
Over the past 7 seasons I have averaged a profit of 31 points each season at a ROI of between 7 and 8%
It is what keeps me going on the days when things go wrong and equally I never go overboard on those great days where everything we touch turns to gold, which seems to happen at least once or twice every season.
And this is the nub of things for anyone betting seriously:
In a short run of bets, such as a half season or a few months you often get an extreme run of positive or negative results and I am sure that’s what happened for me this season more than usual.
When things went well in the first half of the season they went extremely well – with a lot of results falling our way, late in games. Latterly, when we’ve had a bad day or a bad run, the bit of counterbalancing luck you’d expect has deserted us.
At the time it doesn’t seem significant – three bad days a season.
But if you take say just five losing football bets and turn them into winners over a run of say, 100 bets you’d see quite a different picture and the effect of small margins for error, really running for you in individual games.
If you extrapolate that out, then -15pts or +15pts over 300 bets could typically be turned into a -15pts to a +20pts, a swing of as much as 35pts.
I’ve tried to mitigate against that potential for volatility by having more bets this season. It hasn’t worked out like I’d have hoped, largely because there’s been less goals around than I’d expect in the second half of the season. What I’ll need to ponder is, ‘is that likely to be an ongoing trend or is it just a quirk of a particular run of games?’
I look at 2019’s results and I don’t think there’s a deeper meaning to them than the variance of a small sample, based on my experience over the last 12 years. And I also know that to look or invent reasons for a run of results in retrospect, when you are dealing with a small sample size, can lead you down a false trail. I am wary of doing that.
SBC: Were there any notable highlights or challenges faced last season which stand out?
Greg: Starting with a negative: In a football sense there’s been a lot less late goals than I’d normally expect in the leagues I bet in, over the last two quarters of this season.
There’s been a lot less late goals than I’d normally expect in the leagues I bet in
That could be a function of a few things – players mentality, teams’ instructions and a fear of conceding overriding a desire to go and take risks to score that winning goal.
My suspicion is that current coaching fashion and the ‘too many cooks’ culture at most football clubs isn’t helping teams get a consistent, coherent message across to players for the whole season long.
For example, Liverpool take 25+ staff to every away game. In my opinion what can they possibly be adding other than a need to justify their own salaries? The result isn’t good for players that basically need a clear, concise message at all times, and strong sense of who they answer to and what the expectations are for them. Instead, their heads are full of complex, competing messages from a series of ‘expert practitioners’ from various disciplines.
So, what does this mean in terms of football betting? I think in a season of two halves, motivation and demotivation is going to be a key influencer on results and also goals tallies looking ahead. I think we now have to consider how we respond to a season, not as individual games or quarters but as two distinct halves.
So, while I started this answer with a negative, I think there is also a massive opportunity here for punters and tipsters that can look at the calendar in a dynamic, new way.
SBC: Will you be changing your tipping strategy at all for the forthcoming season? If so, what adjustments will you be applying and why?
Greg: For me it is always small changes, tweaks to thinking. The foundations are all solid but what fluctuates are short term results. Mainly, I’ll approach this season with optimism and an open mind. I think being open minded to the need to adapt on the hoof, and also being resolute where you need to be, is the balancing act that every punter has to negotiate.
SBC: Which bookmakers do you recommend for those following your service?
Greg: These days I am almost running a three tier service. For every member I have with a full suite of bookmaker accounts as listed on Oddschecker, I have many more restricted to a few accounts, solely to the exchanges or solely to Asian accounts or a provider such as Mollybet.
I only bet on match results and goals markets these days so the service isn’t restrictive or hard to follow.
It is a broad church service with a common sense approach – whether you bet with bookmakers, exchanges or bet brokers.
Basically it is a broad church service with a common sense approach – whether you bet with bookmakers, exchanges or bet brokers. I’ve set it up so everyone can get the bets on somewhere and in some combination that suits the accounts at their disposal.
SBC: What advice do you have for punters to help them with their football betting this coming season?
Greg: In terms of addressing a bad run, and this is general betting advice for tipster or punter alike, and advice I’ve been given myself: it is a balancing act between maintaining good principles that have stood you in good stead for many years while keeping an open mind to the potential for underlying change in the markets you are betting on.
On an individual level that means going back to first principles with every bet and making sure that you are confident that your thinking is sound and that you are betting to prices where you have an edge. Those are the two things that as a punter you can control – your opinion married to the price on offer. Everything else is ‘on the day’ and especially so in a low scoring game like football.
When the dust has settled and you are looking back over the bets you’ve done, see if there are common mistakes in your thinking, or pitfalls that you regularly fall into. Obviously, these are things that cost you money, that you don’t want to replicate.
I always say that you learn far more from your losers than your winners because winners don’t tend to be evaluated fairly. When we win we assume that skill has played a greater part than luck for the most part. It is easy to be over-critical of a good bet that has lost and to consider the process that got you there to be flawed.
I always say that you learn far more from your losers than your winners because winners don’t tend to be evaluated fairly
I wish there was a series of easy answers I could give you, but I know from past experience that taking care of details and simultaneously working hard on individual bets and the bigger picture is the only way to turn results around and that’s what you should strive to do. It is sore when you lose always, but it is not half as sore when you know that you have done your homework and applied your methods consistently. That’s what generates long term, steady success and that’s what means you’ll come out in front in the end, again and again.
SBC: Do you have any strong ante-post bets or teams/angles/managers to watch for the coming season?
(Note – the following was written on the 30th July and since then, some of the market prices have changed)
Greg: In the antepost markets, I can’t see past Cove Rangers in League Two they have been a popular choice in preseason but I still think there is value in their chances at anything over 5/4 (2.25). They are probably going to go off at around 7/4 (2.75) by the start of the season.
(Greg was correct on the above as before their first game of the season, Cove were 7/4 and are now 11/10 after an impressive start)
As an each way treble of Falkirk to win League One and Dundee United to win The Championship and Cove to win League Two should pay around 13/1 (14.0) and I’d expect all three to be in the frame
Cove have three players on Championship wages in League Two (Park, Masson and Megginson) and the money to back up an assault on the lower leagues above their current level. I can’t see any consistent challenge to their deep pockets over the next 10 months as every other team in their section has had to rebuild from scratch this summer and will take time to gel, even if their recruitment proves to be good. Cove, with a settled team that are used to winning, could be out of sight before the daffodils have bloomed.
SBC: Can you outline the membership options and terms you are offering during the 2019/20 season and any special offers you might have for SBC Members?
Greg: I always offer a £100 discount to SBC members. That takes annual fees of £375 down to £275 for the season up until May 2020.
Factor in the ability to join the Smart Betting Club for just £27.99 and anyone wishing to join my service would be mad to not join you guys first.
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Grab Your Copy of The 2019/20 Season Football Tipster Guide
You can read more from Greg and 15 other proven football experts inside the 2019/20 Season Football Tipster Guide with a Smart Betting Club membership.
Providing insight into the experts with a proven history of making money football betting long-term
It also includes details on 2 expert football tipsters providing their advice for free to Smart Betting Club members this season.
For those of you interested in other sports and how to turn a profit from them – you can also read detailed examinations, reviews and ratings on the best tipsters across the likes of Horse Racing, Tennis, Golf, NBA, NFL, Darts & much more as well.
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Best Regards
Peter Ling
Smart Betting Club Owner and Founder
