How To Get Started With £2 Bets

A couple of weeks ago I received an email that really struck a chord with me. It was asking about how to get started using just £2 stakes. We’ve all started placing the lowest stakes that Betfair will allow, but very seldom does anybody write about how to do it. And I’m equally as guilty as everyone else. You see we all talk about using £10 or £25 stakes to achieve a certain profit, but… what if you aren’t able to place bets that big?

Well today I’m going to rectify this by outlining how you get started with just £2 stakes. So… get yourself ready, because this is a blueprint to go from the very beginning to success.

The first thing that you will need, in abundance, is patience.

You’re not going to get rich betting £2 stakes.

Okay… so you already know that. But let me confirm that you’ll also not going to go from betting £2 to £20 or more in a few weeks or probably even in a few months. So if you haven’t got patience then this isn’t going to work for you.

If you’re still reading then you’re one of the very few bettors out there who have the patience to start with £2 and become a success.

Now you have to decide if you want to learn how to find the selections yourself or pay someone else to find them. You can of course do both, and that is what I would recommend when you start, but if you want to find them yourself then start by reading through all the articles on this blog and then begin testing. You shouldn’t start betting until you’ve been paper trading for at least a couple of months. There’s a whole lot more to getting started by finding selections yourself and I’ll write about that in another article. But for today I’m going to focus on using a service to find your selections for you.

And this is how you’re going to do it.

Step 1

Head over to our tipster proofing and find a service that has a high strike rate and a profit of at least 5% ROI (Return On Investment) to BOG (Best Odds Guaranteed) over All Time. I know that 5% doesn’t sound like much, but services with a high strike rate will have, most of the time, a much lower ROI.

At the time of writing a service that has this is Andy Bell.

Step 2

Analyse the services results. Now you’ve found a service you need to get a feel for how that service performs. The questions you need to ask are:

How long are the losing downswings?

How quickly does it recover from them?

What’s the biggest downswing?

How long has the service been proofing selections?

How many selections does the service provide on average every week and month?

The answers to these questions will guide you as to whether this is the service you need to use to get started in Step 3.

Step 3

Now that you’ve found a service you need to determine whether it’s a fit for you! Even if a service makes a profit it doesn’t mean that it is a good fit for you.

The questions you need to ask yourself are:

Am I comfortable with the downswings this service gets?

Has this service been proofing long enough for me to have confidence in them? (you should not use a service with less than 3 months proofing as a minimum)

Do I have the time to place selections and record results every day?

Am I comfortable with the number of selections being provided or is it too many or too few?

If you answer No to any of these questions, then the service you are looking at is not for you. That’s no problem, look for a different one. Whatever you do don’t cheat yourself into thinking a service is suitable for you just because they make a profit. In the long-term it won’t work for you and only leads to disappointment. If a service isn’t for you, go back to Step 2 with a new one. You will find one that is going to work for you.

Step 4

Work out the cost of the service. As you’re starting with just £2 bets you have to be able to afford the service every month for an extended period of time before your bets will be big enough to cover the cost of the service. You need to work out how long this is likely to take.

Go back to the proofing page for the tipster you’ve chosen and change the settings to All Time and BOG and Flat Stakes. Then under the graph press the Download Results button and this will download a CSV file to your computer with all the tipsters results in.

These results will be based on 1 unit stakes. So for £2 bets you can simply double the results. But we want to do more than that, because we’re going to be re-investing our profits into our bankroll.

You will already know what the biggest downswing is, in our example it is 20 units, simply double this for your bankroll. If you like to play it safe then triple it. This is your bankroll, so we will be using 40 units. Work out what percentage of your bankroll each bet is by doing the sum:

(1 divided by bankroll) multiplied by 100

(1 divided by 40) multiplied by 100 = 2.5%

For this example our bet would be 2.5% of our bankroll.

In your spreadsheet put at the top in Column I your total starting bankroll, £2 x 40 units = £80.

Assuming you’re using Excel, in the row 3 down put the formula:

=IF(F3=””,I2,I2+(F3*(I2/40)))

You would need to replace the 40 with however many units your bankroll has.

For Andy Bell at the time of writing this goes from 1st November 2013 to 23rd April 2014 and the bankroll has gone from £80 to £666. Pretty good! A profit of £586 in six months.

The service costs £199+VAT for six months, which is £238.80. So, in fact, we’ve covered the cost of the six month membership. But we want to get an idea what will happen in the next six months.

Take your original bankroll and divide it by the bankroll you’re left with….

£80 divided by £666 = 8.32

The bankroll has multipled 8.32 times in the six months. Now we need to see what should happen in the next six months if we remove just over £300 to pay for the last six months of the service and a bit more for ourselves, starting with a new bankroll of £200.

We can expect it to increase by 8 times to £1600. The six months after this we can start again at £500 and eighteen months after starting with £80 you can expect to have a bankroll of £4000!

Has it taken time… Yes.

Have you had to be patient… Yes.

Are you now successfully betting… Yes.

Of course, it’s always possible that the service you are following stops producing a profit. But… it doesn’t happen very often to a service that has been successful for a long period of time.

What happens more often is that punters think a service is no longer making a profit based on a very small amount of data when in fact they are just going through an extended downswing.

It’s no wonder bettors do this, it’s one of the hardest things to cope with.

But to get over it I am going to put a rule in place that you MUST follow.

Whatever bankroll you start with each six months you either lose or continue to use. Never top it up, if the bankroll is lost then you need to look for a new tipster. But be prepared to continue placing bets until you get to your new six month point or have lost the entire bankroll. If at the six month point your bankroll is in a loss then that’s fine. You still need to continue with the service using what is left.

A downswing of three months or more can be recovered very quickly during a winning streak, and you don’t want to have quit before that happens!

So there you have it. A complete blueprint to go from £2 stakes. If I was to be starting again from the beginning, this is exactly how I would do it!