Joe Buchdahl is a renowned sports betting analyst and author. A science graduate from Cambridge University, he transitioned from a career as an environmental scientist to the betting industry.  He manages the website Football-Data.co.uk, which provides historical results, match statistics, and betting odds data. He has authored several influential books on sports betting.  Follow Joe on X.

What was the first bet you ever placed and when was it?

Probably a £10 bet at 24/1 on Liverpool to win the 1990/91 domestic treble. I think I must have jinxed them because they didn’t win another championship for 30 years, although I think that might have had something to do with Graeme Souness.

How did your interest in betting start?

It’s by now a well-told story of being introduced to the professional horse racing bettor Patrick Veitch at Cambridge University. He was already making thousands per week (average) at the high street bookies (pre-internet days) using runners to place bets and collect winnings for him, which I did a couple of times. Funnily enough, the lad who ran Patrick’s tips line, and who I ended up living with in my final year there, went on to become a well-known BDSM pornography king (Kink.com). Like Patrick, he was also a prodigious mathematician. Very clever people these mathematicians, even if they end up with strange careers. ?

Apart from your own, what is the single best piece of advice you have ever received about betting?

Probably the most recent, which is that it’s not always a bad idea to take a negative expected value bet (if you’re into hedging and maximising bankroll growth).

And the worst?

Not advice as such, but some of the early books on football betting; they are basically useless. Full of ideas that don’t work (I tested them), or if they ever did work, stopped working because that’s what happens when you release profitable information into the public domain. I won’t name names, the authors know who they are, because they probably also know that what they published was an absolute load of shite.

What has been the most exciting innovation in sports betting over the last few years?

For me personally, probably a very basic one: Betfair’s cashout facility which meant I no longer had to think and calculate about trading out of a position.

What made you decide to set up your  football data website way back in 2001?

Largely because I was struggling to return a sustainable profit from the football betting systems I was using (probably reading too many of those crappy books), so I posed the question on the Punters Lounge betting forum, “how much would you be prepared to pay for downloadable historical football matches results and betting odds?” £10 was an average so I set up the site and a year or so later introduced a £10 subscription fee. In the first year of earning, I took about £9k.

How has affiliate marketing changed over the decades?

For me it all happened by accident. To make the website look nice I agreed to put some banners and links on it, Bet&Win (now bwin) were one of the first. After a while I was getting e-mails from them saying I’d made 16 Euro, or 27 Euro, or whatever it was, and didn’t get it. The late Paul Ross, who took over the ownership and management of Punters Lounge, was doing similar and explained that these commissions were affiliate rewards. The penny then dropped. The early days of affiliate marketing were basically a wild west of deregulated gambling with bookmakers just throwing money at advertisers (Mansion flew me to the 2006 World Cup for example), much of it in the form of referral bounties (CPA), £10, £20, £30 or more for a single customer. I remember Paul Ross telling me once he’d done 982 Blue Square referrals on Grand National day. It was probably his fault the bookmakers started suspending rewards for that day thereafter. ? With Google refusing paid ads (which I’ve never done anyway) for their rankings up until about 2009, it meant I could get ranked easily for key words. Over time, bookmakers offered less CPA and more revenue share. This obviously led to the scandal that certain tipster sites were deliberately advising losing bets to earn money. This was obviously a journalistic misunderstanding since you don’t need any skill to advise anyone how to lose money in sports betting. The fallout saw Skybet close their affiliate programme in 2017 to all but a few large affiliates, one of whom was the alleged ‘losing tips’ website. However, this attitude (they would presumably call it a ‘business decision’) was hardly a surprise; many bookmakers before them had already just booted me for various reasons mostly associated with either not sending enough new customers or not sending them enough losing customers. It may come as a surprise, and possibly with not much sympathy anyway, but the same problems winning punters suffer with bookmakers are broadly the same problems many affiliates have faced too.

You are well known for your scrutiny of tipping services and analysis of betting history.  Can you talk about the P-value in layman’s terms?

P-value is simply the probability of seeing the betting performance you are seeing happening by chance without any bettor skill involved. P-value = 0.01, for example, means a 1% probability. The smaller the p-value, the less likely it is that something has happened by chance, and therefore the greater the belief we can have that something other than chance may have contributed to or ‘caused’ the results that have happened. The most obvious cause in this context is bettor skill at forecasting. Typically, you want p-values of 5% or lower (my preference is for 1% or even 0.1%) before you should start believing that something other than chance is at work. 1% probability it happens by chance does NOT mean a 99% chance it is happening by skill. The P-value test tells you nothing about the probability of skill, just the probability of something happening by chance without a cause.

Is there a minimum number of bets, P-value, ROI %, or any other metrics that bettors should be aware of when assessing their own (or someone else’s) betting records?

As a general rule of thumb, I would not start to make any serious interpretations of a bettor’s skill until they’d had at least 1,000 bets. The size of the ROI depends on the odds (a 10% profit is far more impressive at odds of 1.5 than it is at odds of 15), and for me I’d want to see a P-value below 0.001 (0.1%) before getting interested. Closing line value (CLV) is another useful metric for which you need far fewer bets to be confident that skill is at play, but absence of CLV doesn’t always imply absence of skill; it’s a much debated metric.

Do you place fun bets on things you do not have a strong sense of value about?

I only place fun bets now and don’t think too much about the value. Obviously, I’ll still try to get the best odds and I’ll only place the bet if I think the odds may be wrong, but all of this is very qualitative. I only now bet for entertainment. After all, betting is not meant to be seen as a way to make money, right? ?

What is the luckiest you have been with a bet going your way against the odds?

Probably Jurgen Melzer beating Novak Djokovic in the 2010 French Open. I think I had about 5/1. Melzer was 2 sets to 0 down. Djokovic had never lost a 5-setter being 2-0 up. He’s never lost one since. It was the only time it ever happened. I really shouldn’t have won that bet. I imagine Betfair were pricing Melzer at 1,000 at the end of the second set.

What is the unluckiest you have been with a bet/trade?

So not actually a bet, but a bet I didn’t place because I thought it was too absurd. I told the story in my first book. William Hill had priced Slovenian ski jumper Primoz Peterka at 200/1 to win the opening competition of the 2002/03 season. They’d obviously missed the fact he’d won the qualifying the night before. I posted the advice on the Punters Lounge and then didn’t make the bet myself because I just thought it too unlikely no matter how much value it held. Lesson learned.

What is the most satisfying win you have had in your time as a serious punter?

In terms of value, probably it was a weather-related bet. 10th August 2003 was the day the UK had it first recorded temperature of over 100 F. Ladbrokes had been offering 4/1 for the threshold to be broken. These types of bets are usually shortened significantly because of punter stupidity and bookmakers exploiting the favourite-longshot bias. Typically, you’d expect a fair price for this to be something like 20/1 even when temperatures are hitting the mid 90s. However, I’d seen a weather forecast at 11am which was showing a hot plume over south east England with temperatures already at 35 C. This was way earlier than normal so I figured it was probably 50-50 for this record to fall, giving me expected value of 150%. And it did. I didn’t make a lot – just small three figures – but it was definitely a very satisfying feeling betting on a topic I actually know a lot about but the bookmakers obviously didn’t.

Are there any sports you will never touch in betting?

Horse racing, since I know absolutely FA about it, unless I’m at the races, and then it’s just a bit of fun for me. I’ve never actually ever bet on the Grand National, since I regard it as possibility the stupidest market in betting.

When we asked our last guest this question, their answer was you!  So do you have a standout account on social media (X) or YouTube whose opinion you respect?

Probably two, or maybe three: @DoctorRazzWSOP and @PlusEVAnalytics for their mathematical prowess in betting, and @aluckyaday for his ability to play devil’s advocate and make me think about having to change my opinion all the time, even though he annoys the hell out of nearly everyone else. ? Also, anything by expert trader Matthew Trenhaile is worth listening to, but for now he seems to have disappeared from Twitter, yet again!

Do you bet away from sports? Stock market, poker, crypto, other?

Occasionally I’ll go to a land casino and have a play. All my financial investing is long term buy-and-hold stuff, I wouldn’t touch stuff like Forex or day trading since I consider these to be just forms of gambling. To be good at these requires a large amount of work and time, just as for sports betting, and I’m not motivated enough to put that effort in. And crypto is just for sociopaths and narcissists, isn’t it? ?

What are the shortest and longest time-frames you have had with a bookmaker before being stake-restricted?

The longest is probably about two years if we are talking about regular active betting. The shortest is one bet, in 2013. Blue Square limited my account to 70 pence after one £50 winning bet. There was actually another even shorter – Meridianbet – although strictly speaking it wasn’t a restriction, because I never even got to place one bet. They refused to let me have an NBA price (1.41) on their website after I tried to back it. They referred it to their traders who then offered me 1.22, whilst at the same time shortening their public offering to 1.26. After the same happened a couple more times on other markets, I just closed the account myself. Either they knew my name, or they just weren’t to be taken seriously.

How many books do you think you have been restricted with, if you are happy to share that number?

Not sure precisely, probably around 20. The restrictions were the main reasons I just stopped serious betting and only did it for fun. I didn’t need the additional income so wasn’t as motivated as others might be to find ways around the restrictions, so I probably could and would have been restricted by many more but never got to that point.

Over the last decade, you have published several books that are essential reading for any budding sports bettor. Can you talk about the processes involved when you wrote your first book? 

Very simple and probably somewhat lucky. I was spending a lot of my time writing posts on the Punters Louge and one day, in 2002, I just woke up and thought: “why am I giving all this away like this? I should put it down in a book.” So over 6 weeks I wrote Fixed Odds Sports Betting putting down everything I knew at the time about betting, then found a publisher, told them I had a full script, and they took it just as it was. The rest, as they say, his history. For this and the subsequent books, whilst I may have some kind of rudimentary plan in my head about how I want the book to go, for the most part I just find that it simply pours out of my brain. I find things more creative that way.

If anyone who sees this interview is thinking about purchasing one of your books, which would be the first one to get them started?

My third one Squares & Sharps is still may favourite because it deals with all the psychological biases, like overconfidence, that bettors should be familiar with, but arguably the last one Monte Carlo or Bust is the most mathematically useful, covering most of the topics an aspiring bettor should be thinking about.

Do you have plans for further books in the future? 

I do, but it almost certainly won’t be a gambling book.

If your 20-year-old self was reading this, what would your one piece of advice be?

If you’re going to “throw your life away” earning good money from a frivolous industry that arguably lacks any serious meaning, make sure you’re comfortable with that, and be ready for the social isolation working for yourself will bring even if you love the subject matter.

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