Don't agree, nailed Sanchez first goal the other day against Utd for £350 profit. How long will that take you to get in terms of these inplays? 6/7? By that time I'm sure I'll nail at least one more first goalscorer, and it just continues.
Its personal preference I guess. Depends if you value £30/40 more than a punt at big bucks. I guess everyones a winner with the inplays so fuck it, give us more 365.
Sorry for the slow reply - am in Aus so only just caught up with all this discussion today.
To answer your question, yes it takes a while to build it up, but since the 1st State of Origin rugby here in Oz (late May - so only 5 months ago) I am just under $6000 up. I've done that pretty much all risk-free, by placing the majority of bets on promo markets where you get a refund in a certain outcome. I gave a detailed description of one of these in the NON-FOOTBALL BETS thread at the time - for details see
(The way I set it up is such that you cover both contingencies of a 2-way event - so essentially the cost you pay is the market advantage, which if you have several bookies you can usually get down to about 2-3% of total stake, though obviously you are constrained by which bookie is running the specific promotion. At the worst case you might have to take a 5-10% loss on the total stake you use to cover all the outcomes, but even then if you take the ratio of your guaranteed loss to the potential profit that give you the effective odds you are getting on whatever outcome.)
The bottom line as you say - and I totally agree with - is it comes down to personal preference. However, there are a couple of other factors that come into play.
(i) Both strategies mean that over the long term you are beating the odds, except by going for longer priced options you are making it more variable and therefore volatile. So there is both more chance of getting ahead much quicker, but equally there is a greater chance of a run of bets that don't come in. In your example you stated you hit the FGS first time, which is great. However, I'm sure I could go back through this thread alone and find 10 times the number of posts cursing a player for missing a pen/easy chance/getting subbed etc. So it's not out of the realms that you could set up 10 risk-free bets and lose them all - whereas taking the safe option each time would have gained a few hundred.
(ii) In order to regularly back long shots, you have to have a pretty decent idea of the market itself. So for example, because everyone in here follows the PL, we are all pretty aware that Sanchez is a gun player and a reasonable chance to be FGS. However if I were to ask you about the first goal kicker in an Aussie Rules match, you would be far less likely to know - so your chances of regularly picking something around 10/1 go down substantially
In contrast, if you take the free money, you don't have to know anything about the teams involved, or in fact even the sport! I have no idea how the LA Lakers compare to the Minnesota Timberwolves - but I do know from the odds (roughly 1.70 to 2.15) that they are favourites, but not by a huge amount - so a win by 8 points or less (as I require to come out ahead) is within the realms of possibility.
Based on this I am able to take advantage of promos on Football, Tennis, Aussie Rules, Rugby League, Rugby Union, Baseball, Basketball, American Football, etc without having to know much about any of them - which means that the total amount of promos I can use is vastly expanded. Pretty much the only thing I don't do is racing, as that is too volatile and complex to cover all the options reliably (I could do it by laying on Betfair, but I don't really like Betfair Aus, most of their markets tend to be a bit patchy).
(iii) Winning big against the bookies makes them take notice of you - note even on the last page someone got restricted to £3 max stake by Coral. The tactic I generally like is to accumulate profit in terms of either refunds (preferred) or bonus bets (where I can guarantee about 60-70% of the value back by laying it against another bookie). I usually set it up hoping that the bonus bet actually loses, so that the bookie who gave the refund doesn't incur any cost from it and are therefore (hopefully) less likely to ban me from taking part in promotions. As an added perk, by laying off the bonus bet with a different bookie, that adds a bet on a non-promotional market to my account, which gives the appearance that I am mixing up the promos with normal bets, even though its all risk-free!
Either way, I am much happier chipping away at the bookies slowly and spreading it across 5 or 6 of them - I imagine I'll get banned at some point, but hopefully I get a decent run in before then...
