With a few new sports and adjustments made to our software, we thought it was probably time to adjust our recommended presets.

These are tried and tested presets that the Trademate Sports team have been using for their own value betting.

But, these are probably not the complete, fully optimised presets. You can always make additional tweaks with your own preferences based on where you are from, what sports you want to bet on and how much risk you want to take. We would recommend using the big data tool in Trademate to support such decisions.

Please note that the full analytics and big data tool costs €80/month with Trademate Core or if you complete the trades challenge during your trial week and subscribe you get it for free for your first month!

Important Things to Note with Presets

Organising presets: For particular bookies and odds lines, some types of trades are easy to place while others are hard to place. This is because we get odds updates at varying speeds for different lines at different bookies. The fast one’s are easy to place, the slow ones are hard to place in time. Therefore, we recommend organising your Tradefeed in a prioritised manner based on how easy it is to place the trades, so that you reduce the time you spend chasing edges where the odds have changed. For example your prioritisation could look like this:

1. 1X2 & Moneyline
2. Over/Unders (also known as totals)
3. Asian Handicaps, European Handicaps and Spread bets.

This could also enable you to remove bookmakers where you know it’s hard to place a certain type of bet. E.g. If you know that it’s easy to place 1x2 bets at Bet365, but Asian Handicaps are difficult, you could place all of the 1x2 bets first, before you try placing any AHC bets. Or just remove Bet365 from the Asian Handicap preset all together.

Bookmakers: It generally doesn’t matter what bookmaker you bet with, an edge is an edge. There is an exception to this though, which we will highlight below. Also, it is important to sign up with bookmakers who provide the most value betting opportunities to maximise your turnover. If you want to know which ones those are, send us a message in our customer support.

Odds ranges: Setting up your odds ranges is completely up to you and your risk/variance preferences. If you can’t handle long losing runs, then you should keep your odds range somewhere around 1 - 2.5. If you can’t handle losing bets when the odds are heavily stacked in your favour, then you should set a minimum odds of something around 1.75. But a far superior approach would be to define a max bet in your profile settings or just reduce your stake if it’s too high compared to your risk tolerance. The Trademate Sports team takes bets down to 1.01 in odds. You should just set your max odds depending on your variance preference. But we do recommend setting a higher minimum edge for odds above 4.0, which we will explain below.

Recommended Leagues: The problem with betting on the "all leagues" filter and lower leagues in general is two-fold. One, because you are more likely to get limited faster as not many people bet on them, so when you do and you win, it makes it look like you have a strategy. In other words, you’re not the standard punter who bets on the EPL or the NFL every now and then. Two, there is less liquidity in those markets. So let's say you bet on a lower league game 2 hours before kick off, within those 2 hours if someone puts a big bet down it could turn the market upside down and your edge could turn into a big -EV bet. Also, because the liquidity is a lot lower it means the market is less efficient. So you want to make sure you have a safety margin there, and increase the min edge to 2%. As a general principle it’s good to stay away from youth and reserve leagues. Other leagues should be fine from an edge perspective, but can get you limited faster if you appear to be a sharp bettor.

It only makes sense to bet on lower leagues if you are from the country where the league is or a neighbouring country. For example, if I'm living in Australia or New Zealand, then it makes sense for me to bet on the soccer league there (A-League), but if I was living in Europe and betting on it that would seem strange. Also, because of the possible swings in the less liquid markets, we recommend trading closer to kick off and setting a higher minimum edge.

We have customers who follow an approach of maxing their number of bets in the shortest possible time. Which is a different approach to maximizing lifetime value extracted from the accounts. But one we've seen be successful as well. Just know that your accounts will get limited faster if you're a Norwegian who's betting on Bulgarian basketball. Overall, we recommend sticking to the recommended leagues for 95% of your trades as it will preserve the lifetime of your accounts. More exceptions to this will be listed below.

After Placed Trades: We recommend the setting “remove all trades on that match” for a couple of reasons. The first is because of variance. If you have multiple bets on one game and they all lose or win, you are going to have big swings in your results which you might not be able to handle.

Second, if you are betting on multiple markets in one game and win all of them, it increases the chance that the bookies will profile you as a sharp player, because they notice that you were maxing out all of the possible value you could get on the game. Especially if you place Asian Handicap bets such as Liverpool -0.25, Liverpool -0.5, Liverpool -0.75. That is the easiest way to annoy the bookmakers and get yourself limited, because they are all very similar bets. On the other hand side of this argument, one could say that a proper gambler (which the bookies love) would want to get as much action on a game as possible.

But we still recommend sticking to one bet a game to keep yourself and the bookies happy!

Preset 1: Soccer

Soccer is Trademate's most consistent profit-maker. Maximising the amount of Soccer trades you place should be your top priority when using our software.

This is the standard odds range we recommend, but you can alter according to your risk/variance preference. The minimum edge of 1.5% gives you a good buffer against a late change in the market out of your favour. And unless you take a higher minimum edge, we don’t generally recommend betting further than 8 hours before kick off as lots more information can enter the market past that point.

Preset 2: US Sports

As you can imagine, betting on American sports is a completely different ball game compared to betting Soccer. At times we have seen really variant results on the major leagues like NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. So to reduce some of the variance and give you a smoother ride, we recommend taking a higher minimum edge of 3% on the major American sports. Also, as we are about to highlight below, we have had some inconsistent results using Bet365 on American sports. So we would recommend digging into each individual sport using the big data tool to optimise your approach to betting American sports with Bet365.

Preset 3: Bet365 Soccer 1x2

In the bookmakers section above, we mentioned an exception to our general rule when it comes to placing bets with particular bookmakers. Over time, we have noticed a continuous trend when it comes to betting on the 1x2 Soccer markets using Bet365. Our results when betting on both lower odds ranges and taking a minimum edge smaller than 3.5% have been less than ideal. The reasons for this is unknown, we could speculate as to why but there is not much point. The most important thing is that you aware of this trend are able to avoid it! So the above preset is what we recommend for this particular bookmaker and respective market.

Anomalies like this could be present within other bookmakers too, which is why we highlight the importance of using our big data tool to find the most profitable presets. But generally, you will be fine following the recommended presets.

Preset 4: Bet365 Soccer Over/Under

Similar to Preset 3, we also noticed a negative trend on the Totals Soccer markets at Bet365 when betting on a minimum edge smaller than 2.5%. So please refer to the image above before you begin betting that market.

Preset 5: Esports and Rugby

These sports are less liquid markets, so you should be taking a higher minimum edge and bet closer to kick like we have suggested. Note that these sports are under the ‘All Leagues’ filter for the above reasons. When it comes to betting on Rugby Union or Rugby League, this is the perfect example of betting on something that makes sense. If you live in Norway or Sweden and you are betting on an Australian or New Zealand Rugby game, that is not a normal thing to do and will cause suspicion.

Preset 6: Tennis

Tennis is another great example of a sport that operates completely differently than others. Simply put, it is not as efficient as Soccer or any of the US Sports, so you need to treat your betting differently. Only the major tournaments are under our recommended leagues but if you take a higher edge on some of the smaller tournaments, especially ATP & WTP events, that will look less suspicious and the market is a bit more efficient. We have some great results in Tennis, but try and stick to the bigger tournaments. Betting on anything small will definitely raise suspicion!

Another thing to note in smaller tournaments is players not putting in maximum effort, especially leading up to a grand slam. We would recommend staying away from those kinds of tournaments as some players use them to just get a bit of match fitness before the bigger tournaments in a week or two.

Preset 7: Big Odds

If you’re comfortable taking bigger odds this is what we recommend. As mentioned above, value is always great, but if you can’t handle losing these bets for a long period of time, stay away!

The following two presets have been added to maximise trades, especially during times where there are not many sports on (eg. COVID break or Soccer off-season). If you can, stick to the presets above for the majority of your betting.

Preset 8: Betting Early

As this preset is aimed at placing bets a bit earlier, it is important to take a higher minimum edge. 4% is the minimum, do not go lower than this, if anything go higher! But this should help you place more trades on our most successful sport.

Preset 9: All Leagues (Maximising Trades > Account Life)

As the name suggests, this preset will help you get lots of trades in, but it will come at the expense of account life. Especially if you are betting on lower leagues like the Malaysian U19 2nd Division Soccer League. Don't go too crazy! The higher minimum edge is there to give you some sort of safety from massive swings, but to be honest, a lot of the time that min. edge might not be enough. As mentioned at the start, because there is not much liquidity in these leagues, massive swings in prices will happen which could go in or out of your favour. Be prepared for that.

If you have any questions or concerns about these presets, please don’t hesitate to leave us a message in our customer support. Hope these help!