Watch Chris Fawcett discuss with David Hipkin how he made over £100,000 in less than one year betting on football using the SharpBetting system. All the SharpBetting videos are available here or go to our YouTube channel.
Video Transcript
David
Hi, Chris. First of all, thanks for your time. I know there are tons of topics that we could discuss today, but I wanted to get into the football betting system that you have been working on for a couple of years. And I have first-hand experience of it as well. So I think this would be a nice to and fro. For those who don't know, you're getting quite a good reputation now, but I would describe you as an AI specialist, a pro-punter and the co-founder of sharpbetting.co.uk.
Chris
Hi, Dave. Yeah, really good to be here with you. And I'm looking forward to chatting about this.
David
Great stuff. So what everyone wants to know, high level, how good was this system? So what was your headline number and how long did it take you?
Chris
So I developed a football betting system and I used it for the best part of a year. And in that year, I made about a £100,000 using it.
So I developed a football betting system and I used it for the best part of a year. And in that year, I made about a £100,000 using it.
David
£100,000. Okay. So did that involve... approximately how many bookmakers would that have involved?
Chris
I used, I think about ten bookmakers in the end. I worked my way through. So through the year, I started with one bookmaker, made some money there, re-invest that money by investing, by putting money into another couple of bookmakers, bet with those two and slowly built the bank through the year. So if someone had more money to deposit early on, they could have done this whole process in three or four months.
David
Interesting. That's very interesting. So rather than take the approach of give me all the bookmakers, give me all the price choices available, you just said, right, one or two at a time, attack, attack, move on to the next one.
Chris
Yeah, absolutely.
David
Okay. So the obvious first question is: That's a decent chunk of money you made there. Without getting into the specifics of how the process works, you can't win without an edge. So can you sort of give a layperson summary of how you were able to find an edge where so many people fail to do so?
Chris
Sure. What I did was - towards the end of COVID - I started thinking, I really want to try a new gambling system. So I downloaded about two million football results. And I also managed to get hold of the closing prices for various different markets on each match.
And then I used all that data I've got to try and, I built a sort of AI model to try and predict where the pricing was wrong. And what I found by doing this was about five percent of markets, the pricing is slightly off. So most of the markets, if you bet on every market, every result, you'd be down about ten percent.
But very occasionally you have a market where, you know, one in ten, one in twenty, if you bet on a particular bet, you would win three to ten percent. So it's a question of just picking off which ones were going to be profitable amongst a huge volume of bets, because obviously the bookmakers nowadays offer so many football matches. Tthey can't possibly accurately price up everything so it's just about going through all those markets and scanning them and trying to find where using the fundamental data of previous results you can forecast that's slightly wrong and that's slightly wrong.
David
And with the vast scope of what markets are available to bet on these days, you're clearly not just focusing on top-tier football.
Chris
No. I read somewhere that things like the Premier League the Champions League and the top leagues only represent for the bookmakers globally about 25% of the turnover. So there's a huge long-tail of thousands of matches every week which the bookmakers don't really, as I said, know what the prices should be. I don't know how they price them up and so I'm just looking for those little errors and you do find them every so often in the market; that one's wrong, that one's wrong
David
Why should everyone in theory be able to beat a soft sportsbook?
I recently read a quote of yours. I don't recall if it's on twitter or another interview but it was along the lines of "with the soft sportsbooks, everyone should be able to win". I particularly like that and it sounds quite punchy but I'd quite like to know exactly what you mean by that; why should everyone in theory be able to beat a soft sportsbook?
Chris
Right, so I think it's important to clarify what a softbook sportsbook is. So these are your mainstream high street bookmakers that offer prices that generally on loads and loads of markets, loads and loads of matches, and they generally don't update their odds that often.
As opposed to that, you have sharp sportsbooks like Pinnacle and the Exchanges that don't have as many markets, and they're pretty efficient. So when I said, yes, everyone should win off the recreational books, it's because the recreational books, I don't know if they do it on purpose or it's just the way it works out. There are a lot of ricks in the market. There's a lot of inefficiencies.
So, for instance, they have each-way betting on horse racing, where if you have like a big odds-on favourite in certain size runners' fields, they're betting overbroke in the place market. So for a couple of decades, people have been picking these off. And actually on the Sharp Betting site now, we have a tool where you can see all the each-way bets that you can make money in the long run if you just back where all these edges are.
Another thing people do is they do match betting where they exploit bonuses, free bets, so that you use the free bet with the bookmaker and you lay off on an exchange.
Another thing people do is if you constantly bet where the bookmaker is offering a price, the recreational book is offering a price bigger than Pinnacle or bigger than the betting exchange. If you just repeatedly do that, you'll make money.
If you have a systematic plan on the basis of one of those three things I mentioned, you shouldn't really be able to lose.
The way you lose money is if you log on to your account, don't really know what you want to bet on, click around and "oh, there's this match on, oh, I'll bet, I fancy that or I like that". That is the way to lose. But if you have a systematic plan on the basis of one of those three things I mentioned, you shouldn't really be able to lose.
David
Yeah, so for me, at my level of betting, match betting is... possibly not that exciting to me. I don't like the idea of doing it very much. I know people do have a side-hustle doing that stuff. For me, who's looked for an edge in every single possible thing be it the casino or you know betting on anything, that's never appealed to me. This system did appeal to me because it felt a little bit more like being opinion-based rather than purely a function of an imperfect marketplace, which I didn't like the idea of it.
So I've never done any match betting. And also you're beating the Pinnacle price or the exchange prices. I would imagine that would be a very quick way of being highlighted as business that they don't want off you for very long.
Chris
Yeah. So I'd have thought someone who does that as part of their gambling. So they're sort of recreational and then every so often pick off a bad each-way race or a beat SP on the horses by following the exchanges. I don't know whether you'd get immediately shut, but if you're systematically doing those sorts of things all the time, you would.
And I think that's possibly why having a system like we have, where we've got the fundamental, our own odds on these slightly liquid markets where no one really knows the price and the way we bet doesn't really move the markets, sometimes it's going to be a bigger price, sometimes it's going to be a smaller price. We're not going to be beating the SP in that way.
David
Right. On your point of how, how "easy" is to beat the soft books. I remember a conversation with you before I started trialing it with my own money. And I've been involved in previous roles with customer profiling. So, looking for signs of problem gambling, skilled behavior, recreational behavior, looking beyond just the headline bet history. For me, I felt when I was setting up my accounts with softbooks, I had seven accounts I set up. Seven accounts and I put around two hundred quid in each of them, maybe five hundred quid in each of them and I was thinking If I could get five hundred quid profit out of each book and maybe get through ten books across the UK, five thousand pounds profit following this system, I thought that would be a tremendous success.
if it works, why are you making it available to the public?
So when I used the system and three months later, I had made eight thousand pounds, I was very surprised that I was able to get eight thousand pounds off the soft books very recently. And you've obviously taken that and more so with achieving over a hundred thousand.
But these are great numbers. The cynics will say, if it works, why are you making it available to the public? And the second question would be, how did you win so much without being restricted to 20p stakes?
Chris
I can't use it anymore. I can't bet with the softbooks anymore. Therefore, why not let other people use it?
Right.
So the first question is pretty simple. I can't bet anymore using the soft books. To me, you've used it, a few other people have used it, and they've all done pretty well on it. But I can't use it anymore. I can't bet with the softbooks anymore. Therefore, why not let other people use it?
The second part, which is how did I manage to get up to a hundred thousand. I started betting with the first bookmaker on singles. And very quickly to me, it became apparent with the number of bets on the list we got, which can be thousands on a weekend, that the best way to do this is to do accas. Because when you think about it, the bookmaker is sitting there...
Do they want to take loads of win singles, you betting fifty quid on different football matches across the globe? That may look a little bit like you might have a clue what you're doing.
But if someone goes in and bets Yankees, Lucky Fifteens, Canadians, all these different types of bets all over the place. And then that's what I found was; they weren't expecting that. That's where they make the money, on accas. Therefore, by doing accas with an edge, the edge works for you. If you have a margin in your favour.
If you have a margin in their favour, then obviously they make a lot of profit. So it kind of turned that against them by having the accumulators.
I was winning money, I was £10,000 up with one book, at that point, they actually increased the bonuses they were giving me.
And then coupled with that, there was another bonus in the sense that because the books thought that I wasn't clued up, they then start thinking, even when I was winning money (I was £10,000 up with one book, at that point), they actually increased the bonuses they were giving me. So they were doing things like, if you bet and place more than seven bets a week you get a ten pound bonus.. well mine went up to fifty pounds.
They did things like if you get three out of four winners on a acca you can get up to ten pounds back. Or if you don't quite win, you get your stake back up to ten pounds. Mine went up to fifty pounds which meant I think you could do that once a day, so at points I was getting back £400 in free bets a week. So all those sort of things and all different bookmakers offer different bonuses.
I mean, at times with one bookmaker, I think if you had a losing weekend, first thing Monday morning, there's like a thirty quid free bet in your account, which is great because you don't necessarily win every weekend.
So there was all those things happening. And the other thing I did was, which I don't think ever made a big difference, was playing slots from time to time. So just sitting there, with one or two bookmakers open, just playing things like Starburst, 10p a Spin, allowing myself to lose five quid, just sit there, play, lose some money, sometimes win. And those sort of things, just to really make the bookmaker think that you're a recreational gambler.
David
I think there's no more evidence that they felt you were recreational than you winning money and them giving you £400 a week in free bets.
I think there's no more evidence that they felt you were recreational than you winning money and them giving you £400 a week in free bets to bet with them. And so, like me, you presumably were getting Monday morning emails saying "congratulations Christopher you've won four hundred and eighty quid" and all those things.
Chris
You win and they congratulate you. If they don't close you.
David
Yeah. I get all that and also I did the same. So to start with, my journey was: I thought priming the accounts was important. So I would certainly, I didn't play any slot games, but I would use all the casino games, small stakes.
This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't understand the industry: invite him to the VIP club!
And I could do twenty minutes on a casino and you're not going to lose the bank. You're going to kind of break even more or less, you know, maybe ninety-five percent return sort of thing. And I would also go into the live casinos where you have the actual human beings putting the ball in the roulette wheel and dealing cards and I pretended I knew nothing about the industry and I would say "hey guys can't believe you're working at the weekend" and all this stuff and as soon as I said something stupid like that I'd get an invitation to join the VIP club and it was perfect profiling for me:
They were like: "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, doesn't understand the industry: invite him to the VIP club!"
But also what I realised is that as I got more confident in the system, as I saw I was winning and I was making a good return on investment, I got pretty gung-ho and I didn't do any priming and sometimes I just set up an account I started betting ten pounds a bet on an even-money shot. After a couple of months I was up to fifty quid and by that point I would just say right I'm gonna have, I don't know twenty quid, twenty bets of fifty quid each... boom just do it without worrying about pretending to be recreational and it still was very successful for me and also there was overall, I think I made about seven percent return on investment, which is incredibly solid. Also I started with a ten pound maximum stake. So with the accumulators that you're you were using, do you have any idea of what it felt like in terms of an ROI? And also comparatively, what sort of stakes were you putting down?
Chris
So I started off betting win £20 a bet. So most of these picks are around even-money, so it's really a twenty quid stake. And after I was doing it for a while, I started trying accas. I was doing five pound Trixies, so that's a twenty quid bet. That sort of thing is what I started with, with the first bookmaker.
Because I think if you go in too hard, then I don't know, because we don't really know how the bookmakers operate. But the impression I got is, I was just trying to build up some money, and then bet more as I got more money in the account. So by the end with that company that was offering the free cashback on the acca, whenever I did something like that, I'd also do those four selections as an acca, because I knew there was a cashback deal.
In terms of what I deposited with that first account, twelve hundred pounds was the total I ever risked because then the money that came out of there went into the next accounts and so on.
In terms of the ROI, that's quite hard to really to describe. I think depending on the price, when you're betting accas, you kind of expect to get a bigger ROI, you know, on a sixteen-to-one shot than you would on an even-money shot. I think it worked out well over 10%, possibly up to 20% with some books.
But what I would say; you were betting singles and you were betting on very much the absolute top margin picks. What I was able to do with backing accas is: you can throw in slightly lower margin bets that you might only expect to make one or two percent because that compounds when you throw in some with higher ones and it makes the betting look recreational. So I was doing an awful lot of, throwing in an awful lot of selections, which possibly pushed the ROI on the accas slightly down from what you'd expected if you just multiplied your seven percent through.
David
Makes sense. Right. Okay. Yeah. And so what about in terms of just the highs and lows of the whole experience?
Again, just going back to my experience, I think there was at least one account I set up on a Saturday morning. I placed three bets. I think I lost one hundred and fifty quid and they shut me down or they restricted me. And it feels like quite a personal attack but again it's part of the process and that was the downside for me but once you understand it's part of the process it's all fine because similarly, I set up an account on a Saturday morning and a few weeks later, I deposited two hundred pounds they shut me down twelve hours later and I withdrew eight hundred pounds so for me that was all part of the process to not take it personally; to say fine, if you can give me eight hundred pounds in a day and you don't want my business anymore, that's fine.
But going back to the whole thing of me thinking five hundred quid per book would be great. That was fine for me. And overall, yes, those are sort of my most extremes of early restrictions with firms. So do you have any similar success stories? What was your best with one book and what was your worst?
Chris
So the worst one was just over £2,000 that was opened up at a weekend on a Friday. I think by the Monday, it was done and the best... There were two that were very similar; just over £30,000 each, out of ten, so I guess you'd say the average was ten grand.
In terms of my experience to be fair to the books most of them they they took the deposits and they paid out. I think there were two books that asked about affordability.
In terms of my experience to be fair to the books most of them took the deposits and they paid out. I think there were two books that asked about affordability. Once I got to the point where I wanted to deposit over about two thousand pounds in total, they would then start asking for bank statements or phone calls and things.
But generally, the way I was doing it was putting in a small amount and hoping to build that money up. So the affordability thing didn't really kick in.
David
So that's interesting. By that stage, depositing £2,000, you're playing with the house's money. You're playing with winnings you've made from your previous sportsbook. So what was your starting point? How much did you say, right, this is my bank to start with?
Chris
So, I mean, as I say, the first book, the maximum I'd ever deposited was £1,200. I probably would have let it run to deposit more but I think if you got to that sort of £2,000 maybe then affordability would be kicked in. I think for me it was all about starting with a small amount and building it up.
That's what works best in the in the current world and it's not just because of affordability. I think it's also if you go in gung-ho depositing loads of money and winning and trying to stake way too much maybe you'll come up on the radar a lot quicker. If you're playing with their money they're kind of they thinking well we want to win our money back; this guy's been lucky.
David
Yeah, a hundred percent. I increased my stakes at certain fixed increments. So starting at ten, I waited untill I'd made £1,000 clear profit. Then I went to twenty and then at different clear steps, I would only increase the stakes. I wasn't very scientific about it. I just followed the system.
But it kind of meant that I was always betting a percentage of a fictional bank, even though it wasn't really a bank because I only put, you know, a few hundred quid in upfront.
So in terms of the betting space, there are many types of bettors.
There are punters, there are sharp bettors, recreational, there are pros. I know you've been pro before. I've been semi-serious, but never anything approaching a pro, but I would have had like a grand on a boxer or a tennis player in the past. Now I am very much a small punter aside from this system.
So for me, feeling like a recreational punter using this system it was only twenty minutes effort a day maybe on Saturday I'd probably do forty-five minutes over a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich or whatever and it felt very much manageable in my lifestyle and after three months I was sitting on eight thousand pounds and eight thousand pounds to anyone is a decent amount.
What sort of effort at its sort of most extreme did it take you to get to your level of a £100,000 in a year?
That's a couple of holidays with the family. It's a new car. It's a decent amount of money. And it had no impact in terms of materially taking up my time. So it was a perfect, I hate the phrase, but side-hustle for me for three months. What sort of effort at its most extreme did it take you to get to your level of a hundred thousand in a year?
Chris
Yes, it varied depending on how much money was in the particular one or two accounts I was working on. So if I had an account that had in excess of ten thousand in it, you're then literally betting that whole ten thousand pounds, putting it on, say, on a Friday afternoon that would take you through to lunchtime on a Saturday. And then as those bets came in and you got some money back from from the winners, then reinvest, putting it all back on for the Saturday afternoon.
I would say it would be at its absolute peak, four or five hours on a Friday, maybe another three hours on a Saturday, a couple of hours on a Sunday. Midweek, not that much because there's not as much football.
So I would say it would be at its absolute peak, four or five hours on a Friday, maybe another three hours on a Saturday, a couple of hours on a Sunday. Midweek, not that much because there's not as much football, but I'd literally bet everything I could during mid-week.
So in terms of taking up time, it was by no means a full-time job. I mean, I was still doing lots of other projects at the same time. It was just something I would just go and say, right, I'm going to place a few bets for an hour or something. And then I'll go back and see what new bets have come up, what's the next phase where there's more value again, and then go again.
So it'd be something I'd have on a separate window and just go to it every so often.
David
When you're placing those sorts of bets, you get crazy trends. So obviously, when I was betting, I would have periods where I might lose ten in a row. And it just looks frightening.
Obviously, the law of large numbers dictates that if you bet enough, everything will even out and you're going to see these strange trends. And similarly, I'd sometimes see fifteen wins in a row and that would look equally extraordinary.
But I do remember one weekend I was in my first month of using it. I think I lost three hundred pounds on a Saturday. You and I got on the phone and it's reductive to say you just told me to bet more, but essentially you told me to bet more in order to reach that long-term. Do you want to just talk a little bit about sort of the mindset? Because you very casually said that you could bet ten thousand over a weekend, twenty thousand over a weekend.
That's a huge leap from me having my recreational bets to knowing that it's not twenty thousand pounds spent, it's twenty thousand pounds in turnover and the expected value of that twenty thousand pounds is worth more than twenty thousand pounds to you. So just talk a little bit about the mindset of going from recreational to taking a bit more seriously.
Chris
So I think in terms of what I was saying to you is I wasn't saying stake more on each event when I said bet more. Absolutely not. Never chase your losses. So for me, my style of gambling nowadays is more I'd rather bet a thousand ten pound bets, than say ten one thousand pound bets. Simply because, like you say, the law of large numbers means it's going to even out over thousands of bets.
But in terms of if you just have ten bets, anything can happen. So that's kind of what I meant there was, yes, bet more selections. You've got a whole list of selections there. Bet more of them. But keep the stakes the same.
David
Yeah. No, I absolutely knew what you meant. I liked hearing it. But yeah, it's... it's definitely a mindset thing. So a big shift for me as well was when I started betting, I would follow every single result and I would have a bet that was winning and then it would lose in the ninety-sixth minute and I'd be disappointed that that bet lost. And then the more I used the system, an individual event is absolutely irrelevant.
So over my... three months to make eight thousand I plotted every single bet on a graph and obviously it's non-linear progress but it's progress. By the end of it I just took a step back and I plotted that entire three months on ten data points rather than every single bet. Ten data points and it's a straight line of profit and again stepping back from individual results and just saying "all about the numbers" - get as much as many bets as you can on, if they're positive EV the maths works looks after everything else.
A previous role of mine I was involved with customer profiling and a big thing people used to talk about was beating starting price; getting on a market that goes on to shorten.
Anecdotally, I felt when I was using this system, sometimes I'd get on a bet at 2.60. see the market move and it might go off at 2.80 I think I've then got a bad bet on and it would go on and win and I said that's perfect the books are looking for that price to shorten but it's lengthened so in terms of the profiling of my behavior I felt that it was a real plus to keep me off the radar. But I don't know if it's anecdotally exaggerated because it was something I was looking for or if it was actually part of, if there's any sort of science behind that. Did you spot that or is it... or am I just making something up there?
Chris
I don't think it's not part of the plan, but there's no reason why if the softbooks are putting up a price on a team in some of these like non-Premier League matches or, you know, all the different matches they're doing, if they're putting prices up across thousands of matches, there's no reason when someone puts... a reasonably small bet on that they're going to change the price. Why would they? We're not using any kind of inside information or anything, and there's no reason why that price is going to particularly move unless there's a flood of money for it, and then people would beat the SP. But there'd have to be a flood of money on thousands of different individual things. So I don't think in the case of what our system does, it's not designed to beat SP. And I don't even think you'd be able to find an SP for all the matches. A lot of them aren't even on Betfair.
David
But for me, it was the opposite that felt good. It felt like I would get on one side of the market and then the rest of the market would come on with a different opinion back the other side, which meant my price drifted. And I was like, this is brilliant. It's me against everyone else. So it was a great way of feeling like I was not going to be factored anytime soon.
Chris
I imagine it would be pretty random as to whether it would drift or even change at all.
David
Right, right. And so talk to me. For me, again, I had no issues getting money into the accounts. I had no issues getting money out of the accounts. You were doing it on a different scale to me. So did you have any problems depositing funds? Did you have any problems, more importantly, withdrawing funds?
Chris
Depositing funds, I had problems with two bookmakers where I got to the point of around two thousand pounds depositing. In terms of withdrawing, one firm was a problem out of ten or twelve firms. So yeah, most of them just paid out.
David
Yeah. Okay. And what about this. We haven't actually mentioned anything to do with football. So I am no football analyst. I'm no football expert. I enjoy watching it. I'll bet on it. I don't mind having a big bet on things I think I know about, tennis, boxing, what have you, but football is not my expertise, but I've won more betting on football than any other sport. Can you talk a little about people who might be watching this thinking that they need to, A, be an expert in football, or B, be an expert in betting, and why that's not necessarily the case?
Chris
Yeah, so I would say in terms of being an expert on football, absolutely not. I'm not an expert in football. It's in essence a data project, looking at millions of data points to work out how to spot the value here. And as a user, you don't need to know how that calculation is done. It's not important. You just need to know that that's value.
In fact, if you start second-guessing the bets because you did have knowledge of football, that can itself be problematic because there's no reason why the thing that you think is a good thing is better value than the thing you think isn't. It's like this is calculated in that way. In terms of betting knowledge, again, I mean, we've had a couple of people use the system that have never bet before in their lives, and they've literally just come on, made money, no problem.
So I think different types of users, I know you've thought a lot about this, could use the system in different ways. And I know that you've got a number of ideas as to how people can use the system.
David
Yeah. So thank you. I think first of all, that is all brilliant. I know most of the stuff already, but I love hearing it all again. And I know some people will find it hard to believe, but it is true.
And so for us, I think what we'll do with the product is; it goes back to the whole thing of if it works, why would you give it away? We'll give it away for free to an extent. I want people to be able to subscribe to a newsletter, an email once a week. You can already sign up on our website at sharpbetting.co.uk. Sign up for a free email. And whether it's a Friday or Saturday or midweek, we will send four or five of our best bets out. Try them, see how much you win over the course of a month or three months. See how you do and then obviously if you want to step it up a notch a paid subscription, not crazy money, cup of coffee or a pint of beer type of money. A few more bets and then another level so maybe from a free service all the way to a paid and then a premium service where if you do want to get the full experience that you and I had then you pay a bit more for it.
I think it's a brilliant summary of what you've been doing over the last few years. And not only does it circle back to some of the things you've been talking about on other podcasts, on Twitter and so on, but it shows the fundamentals of why you are in this industry. So thanks very much for that, Chris. Appreciate it. And anyone watching this, remember that betting is fun and it should be recreational, so keep it under control.
Cheers, Chris.
Chris
Cheers.
