You may have noticed that when we recommend player shots on target bets, they are very frequently at BetMGM/VirginBet (functionally the same book), or Ladbrokes/Coral (also functionally the same book.) Usually when we do this, the price is a significant outlier in the market, because we find these books have a habit of significantly overpricing certain types of player for shots on target.
That’s fine – it’s been very profitable for us and we hope it will continue to be in the future. However, we’d like to spend some time talking about that second part. Only ever having the odd bet on at these books, and it always being a big outlier price when we do, is a recipe to get restricted extremely quickly. Here are some ways we can hopefully maintain our accounts for longer.
Multis
On a weekend or busy midweek, we’ll always have more than one of these. One possibility is to simply double them, or take them in a trixie/patent/etc. This should actually increase your expected returns in the long run, although at the cost of significantly increased variance. This isn’t always possible, and it may not be your preference if you’re at the lower end of advised bankrolls, but it is effective in maintaining accounts for longer.
Bet builders
Another option is to place the selection as a bet builder, with a short-ish odds bet on a very low margin market like 1×2 or goal over/unders. We believe the EV of these selections is more than good enough to justify this additional extra cost and MGM/Virgin’s pricing is suitable for this. Don’t add in nonsense like a 1.01 poke – back a team to win or go for over 1.5 goals or something.
Unfortunately, this can often be a bad choice for keeping a Coral or Ladbrokes account alive – these books have extremely wide definitions of what counts for correlated bets, and will often give you a terrible price for bet builders without good reason. On the other hand, if you’re lucky enough to be getting regular boosts, which Ladbrokes can dole out regularly, and can find a market they don’t consider uncorrelated, you can actually place a higher EV bet than the single would’ve been.
Account priming
You should do this for all your accounts, but especially here. Some early mug punting on four or five team accumulators and some time spent at the blackjack table can pay off the investment many times over in account longevity. For these SOT books you may consider doing more priming than you ordinarily would, and putting on some more frequent muggy-looking bets. You can read more about account priming in this article from SBC.
Shops
For SOT bets, this only applies to Ladbrokes and Coral, but in general this applies to all bets that are offered in this service. If you have the opportunity, you should ALWAYS place bets in the shop rather than online. If you see it in the Telegram, it will almost certainly be the same price in shops. This is by far the simplest and best way to avoid restrictions, especially if you’re placing larger bets.
The only thing to be aware of is that some offers are only available online. By far the most important one to know for our purposes is that PaddyPower do not offer a substitute bonus on shop bets. William Hill do, and so do BoyleSports for our cousins across the water. The other high street books don’t offer it online anyway. Also, this is hopefully obvious but NEVER connect your online account to a shop card, and always bet in cash.