As I mentioned on my about page, my adventure began in the Citizens match in September 2012. It was the day when the first Champions League round was played (I do not mention here the youth adventure from school times where the bets were placed on accumulator (i.e. bet that combines few selections on one coupon) putting the value of 1 pound and thinking about winning 400 or more). I and my work colleagues were interested in football, like most people nowadays. We talked about these events during coffee breaks and we expected an open game at the beginning of the games. Someone stated that the bookmakers put a tempting course on the City. Each of us did a quick analysis and agreed with the preface. At the same time, it was decided that we had to play against Real because the easy money lies on the street. 🙂

I said that I could sign up for a bookmaker account. It fell on bet365 because it was known as stable and had good bonuses to start. After a few minutes, it was ready and I put our money there (for which we did a local collection). Due to the fact that there was this bonus from bet365, we decided that 80% will go to Citizens, and 20% to cover losses if City does not win. The odds for the event were: 1.57 Real, 4.00 Draw, 6.00 City. A colleague from work, who heard our conversation in the kitchen, did not take part in our money collection, but as it turned out he has a lot of knowledge about gambling and surebets. He stated that when we win he will help us to make a bonus turnover with the help of surebets. At first glance, I did not know what he was talking about, but I did not think about it somehow since I thought that the problem of wealth would be solved only in the evening after the match. And you know what? The match was very interesting, a lot of action on both sides. I can say that in my opinion, it was very well balanced. In 85 min Citizens scored a goal at 1: 2 and I have already started analyzing how much we have bet and how much we will win. Screen below shows how the following match has ended:

You have to imagine my exaggeration as Benzma scored, but on the other hand as a sports fan, I accepted the result because I stated that the draw is fair. Unfortunately, a few minutes later C. Ronaldo scored the goal in injury time, which has upset me totally. Since then, I don’t like him very much, even though he is one of the best players in recent years. 🙂 However, one character trait impresses me, Ronaldo has been working hard to achieve success.

The match and the bet were lost, but the light came on that I could make a gamble if the system was chosen properly and I started searching. It was a period when my wife was pregnant and we expected our first child to be born. I thought it was a good time to increase the home budget a little. I focused on individual events, which must have a course greater than 2, which in my opinion pays off. I reviewed various forums, football statistics, gambling models and tested. I remember the most from this period that I tried a flat stake. The effectiveness of my bets was poor, somewhere around 30% -40%, and I was generally in minus or around 0. On the other hand, I decided that since I have 30% effectiveness I will try Martingale strategy (it is about doubling your bet size when you lose) on draws in football matches based on stats. The draw odds are around 3, usually, so it seemed right at the time. The downside was that I relied on league statistics and usually had to wait until the weekend for the next matches. I decided to move to tennis, which I also liked to watch from time to time (mainly Grand Slam tournaments). The strategy was simple -> I bet on break in each subsequent game. If you don’t know anything about tennis and would like to learn more about this game, please write to me or comment on the blog below. In the future when I post about tennis trading, I will explain the basics of this game. Why I choose tennis because tournaments are every day around the world, except maybe one month, December. Practically every day there is a breakpoint (at least I thought so). I started betting and it was going pretty good at first. There was a break in every match. Unfortunately, I came across a match where there were 2 good servers, I don’t remember who played that match anymore, but one of the players was John Isner. There was no break in this match and the match ended with a 7: 6 7: 6 result. I do not have to add that after several unsuccessful attempts my amount increased to a very large amount. My bankroll decreased about 400-500 pounds and I decided to stop betting in this form. It was a time when my beloved daughter was born and I can say that instead of spending it on a baby car I gave the money to bookmakers. You can only imagine what my wife’s reaction looked like.

If you read this post and have been or are in a similar situation, you need to know that gamble in the form that I described is evil and if you can’t deal with it, there are foundations that can help you to deal with it, like https://www.begambleaware.org

Do not blame yourself. Everyone makes mistakes, it is human nature. Keep calm and back on track.

On the one hand, you can point out what I did wrong, i.e. wrong betting, lack of money management, bad strategies, etc.

You may be asking yourself, what made me quit betting, but I’m still in the industry, kind of?

I will give an example that shows my character. Once working full-time at an IT company, I was responsible for the physical migration of large infrastructure to the new datacentre. I was one of the two architects of highly available systems consisting of about 70 physical servers (200 virtual, including SAN, Firewalls, etc.). I was at work at 8 am and we planned migrations from 5 pm to midnight. Without going too much into technical details, we had a problem to launch about 30% of our production servers in the new location. We managed to restore 99% of all environments by 7 am and most importantly, we avoided inconvenient calls from the board and clients. I stayed in the office until 13, only because of this 1% of servers which services we were not able to restore. It did not give me peace, the fact that not everything works. I spent almost 30 hours in the office, not only because there was a problem, but because I was motivated to solve this problem right away. Maybe you have it too? It seems to me that there are people who can’t sleep peacefully until they come up with the solution to the puzzle that troubles them, and so in my case was about gambling.

I chillily analyzed what I was doing wrong and remembered a friend’s words about turning bonuses at bookmakers with the help of surebets. I decided to go into detail about this topic. If you are interested in what surebets are, and how I made up for the losses I made on gambling, just sign up for the newsletter and wait to receive a notification about a new article.