Football Accumulator Tips Ultimate Guide

The Ultimate Guide To Football Accumulators

Ever wondered how to do a football accumulator? What's the point? and why does my mate constantly go on about a team "letting him down" again?

Need to know what a "draw no bet accumulator" is and how it works? If you are just getting started in the murky world of accumulator betting then this article will explain everything you need to know and how you can turn small stakes into massive wins.

A friendly word of advice before you get started:

The more selections you add to your betslip the less chance you have of winning. It's hard enough predicting the outcome of one game on its own and so trying to get four or more means you have to get really lucky. Accumulators are for speculators and gamblers and you would never see a professional sports bettor go anywhere near one.

But they are good fun. And they give a good reason to sit back and watch Jeff Stelling and the boys on Saturday Afternoons if you've nothing better to do.

What Is An Accumulator?

A football accumulator is a series of bets placed where your stake for the first bet is carried forward to the next and if it wins it gets carried forward to the next until you reach the end of the betting sequence and the accumulator pays out if all bets are winners.

If any bet in the sequence loses then you forfeit your stake.

Accumulator betting is designed by the bookies for the bookies and even if the punter wins they generally get nowhere near the true odds that the bet deserves. Here is a great site that will get you started with some excellent accumulator tips

However the beauty of accumulator betting is that you can place a small initial stake and compound that stake into a big win.

That is the beauty of the betting format and also the reason many people fall into the trap of consistently placing accumulators that have very little chance of providing a return!

More Selections Mean Less Likelihood Of Winning

If you keep adding many selections to your bet slip then whilst the return may look amazing on paper, in reality the chances of the bet actually winning are so remote that you may as well have put your money on the National Lottery.

The more additions you make to the accumulator the more chance you have of one result destroying your return.

You may have heard of people who have won extraordinary amounts on accumulator betting – particularly the horses, but these events are very few and far between and that's the reason they make headline news when they do win.

It's all well and good to keep looking for 16 or twenty selection accumulators that are going to make you rich but the cold hard fact is that you will very rarely - if ever - win one in your lifetime.

Think about it – if you can stake £1 to win £600,000 through a multiple betting strategy then however you accomplish it your true odds are 600,000/1 which is why there are not many winners.

Borrowing The Bookmakers Money

The best way to think of an accumulator is that you are borrowing the bookmaker's money in order to apply leverage to your starting capital. That's a fancy way of saying that it's a very cheap way of shooting for large gains with just a small starting stake.

The bookies of course know this and that is why they start offering extra juice to the bet (for example adding a percentage bonus that increases the more selections you have) and they will keep offering you incentives to keep you donating your hard earned cash to them.

Simple Accumulator Strategy

What I am going to show you is a way to get the most return from a small starting bet and impress your mates in the pub every time they rip up their betting slip in front of your eyes or bemoan the one that got away.

The most common accumulators are horse racing and football accumulators – betting that a series of results will occur or betting on a series of winners or a rider to win x amount of races.

However you can also mix and match your selections and you don't have to stick to one sport. In fact mixing up the sports gives you much better odds of winning because you have an opportunity to find more value in a bet.

Finding value in a bet is the key. If you can find value in bets you don't need many selections to earn a decent wedge. For example a £300 return or better is perfectly possible from just three or four selections for a £5 stake and you can add or subtract from the starting stake to fit your pocket.

Let's give you a concrete example and explain how the accumulator works before I show you some more complex examples of accumulator betting.

This was one of the first accumulators I ran with when we started the accumulator betting feature:

A £5 stake potentially returned £6,799.17

	Chelsea v West Brom		Home Win 4/9
	Everton v Reading		Home Win 2/5
	Man Utd v Norwich		Home Win 1/3
	Southampton v QPR		Away Win 10/3
	Stoke v West Ham		Draw 27/10
	Sunderland v Fulham		Draw 23/10
	Swansea v Newcastle		Home Win 6/5
	Wigan v Liverpool		Away Win 10/3

1. Stake £5 @ 4/9 returns: £7.22

2. Stake £7.22 @2/5 returns £10.11

3. Stake £10.11 @ 1/3 returns £13.48

4. Stake £13.48 @ 10/3 returns £58.41

5. Stake £58.41 @ 27/10 returns £216.12

6. Stake £216.12 @ 23/10 returns £713.10

7. Stake £713.10 @ 6/5 returns £1,569.04

8. Stake £1,569.04 @ 10/3 returns £6799.17

Stoke failing to score cost us the jackpot. But as you do more and more accumulators you will hear that lament many more times!

So you can see that the returns are exponential. As you add more and more bets to your accumulator the returns become greater and greater. If you added one more bet to this accumulator at say odds of 6/5 then you are now looking at a return of £14,958.17. Add one more at odds of 3/1 and your return would be close to £45,000!

The key here is that to get odds of 3/1 your bet carries a great degree of risk and who has £15k that they can afford to lose on a random bet? This is why accumulators are so appealing – effectively you are using the bookmaker's money to place bets at a level that you would not normally be able to afford. Or more to the point - afford to lose.

Technically an accumulator is any bet that carries four or more results. Doubles and Trebles are named because they combine two and three bets into the overall return whilst a fourfold and above is an accumulator.

Why Doubles And Trebles Matter

If you do any amount of accumulator betting then it is essential that you get good at doing doubles and trebles. This is the bread and butter of accumulator betting because it provides the building blocks of future returns. Let me show you what I mean:

Fred wants to place a double on both Manchester teams winning this weekend. They are both at home so the odds are short – both are 1/3 and combined into a double £10 returns £17.77 – a profit of £7.77.

That's pretty slim pickings when you consider the draw can upset the bet and you are riding on both results going your way. This type of bet should never be put into a double. These are two single bets and they should stay that way to minimise your risk.

Alice wants to bet on the same games but she knows that United will be resting key players for the upcoming cup final. She places a double on both teams to draw at 23/10.

£10 now returns £108.90 and that is exactly why you would combine your bet into a double. You have less chance of the results going your way but if the first game is a draw your winnings of £33.00 are then staked on the outcome of the second game.

Of course as you add more and more bets to the accumulator the more chance you have of it all going pear shaped and so a fourfold accumulator is the most popular choice for risk/reward ratio.

How To Impress Your Mates In The Pub

How many of your mates do accumulators and are always "just one result" away from winning it?

By far the biggest reason that people consistently lose money on accumulator betting is by adding short priced "bankers" on to their betting slip for extra juice. It's just not worth doing and it is a practice that should be frowned upon by any self-respecting punter.

A typical fourfold would consist of two away winners, a draw and a home win to give you good value for the bet. The trick is not to look for the teams that you fancy to win but to look for the odds in the games that you have available and consider the chances of the outcome occurring.

For example if you picked four home winners in an accumulator all at odds of 1/6 then you would return £18.66 for your effort. Clearly you are not using the bookmaker's money to your best advantage.

By contrast if you picked four away winners all at odds of 6/1 then your acca would return an eye watering £24,010. Perhaps you are feeling lucky today?

As an example of a nice fourfold here is something for the weekend Sir:

Notice I'm not adding in the "absolute banker" of Arsenal v Reading just for the extra few quid.

Sunderland v Man United 4/6

Wigan v Norwich 37/40

West Ham v West Brom – Both teams to score 3/4

Southampton v Chelsea 11/10

£10 returns £117.93

Now this may not seem like your idea of a massive accumulator return and indeed it is probably on the conservative side.

West Ham v West Brom is a game of two evenly matched teams so taking the safer option of both teams to score is preferable for me here. However swapping this out for the draw would double your return OR you could half your stake to £5 and keep the £117.93 return.

That is the beauty of doing accumulators online – it is easy to add or subtract options until you find the risk/reward ratio that you are comfortable with.

The other plus for doing online accumulators is that you don't have to stake a lot to try and turn it into a decent bankroll. Most online bookies accept bets as low as £1 so you don't have to spend a fortune to find out if accumulator betting is for you.

And lastly but certainly not least – make sure you find the best odds for your accumulator. It is one thing to find a bookmaker who has an interface that you can work with easily but there can be big discrepancies in the returns if you don't shop around.

Accumulator Top Tips

1.  Don’t do football accumulators that end on different days or include football matches that have midday and evening start times – it could all be over before you got going.

2. Don’t add “home bankers” just because you can – more often than not they will be the ones that let you down.

3. Do shop around for the best odds – when you are multiplying your odds together in an accumulator small differences can make big changes in your return.

4. Don’t pay for tips – very few tipsters actually make money and football accumulator betting is more akin to pure gambling than skill speculation

5. Do keep a spread sheet of how much you have spent so far. All good sports betting punters keep records.

6. Do stop complaining about the one result that let you down. It makes you sound like a crying baby.

7. When compiling four fold accumulators make sure you know your shit.

8. When compiling eight fold accumulators make sure you trust in the Gods.

9. Always remember it is hard enough to predict one result never mind four or more.

10. The possible outcomes of a fourfold accumulator are 4^3 (four games three possible results win, lose, draw) or 4x4x4 which is 64.

11. The possible outcomes of an eight fold accumulator are 8^3 or 8x8x8 which is 512.

12. Don’t include big derby games. These are always passionate affairs with yellow and red cards and sending’s off that affect the outcome of the game.

13. The true odds of an eight fold accumulator where £2 returns £1,000 are 500/1.

14. Doing one accumulator a week at those odds it could take you over ten years or more to break even.

15. Picking straight home wins at shorter odds is the easiest accumulator to build.

16. Picking teams to draw will give you the most lucrative odds.

17. Picking a mixture of home wins, draws and away wins in larger accumulators will leave you a frustrated, bitter and broken shell of a man.

18. Develop an accumulator system and stick to it like picking your lottery numbers.

19. Both teams to score accumulators are always good fun to compile.

20. Draw no bet accumulators will still give you a return if several games end in a draw.

21. Have fun doing it. If it’s not fun you are not doing it right – stick to knitting.