Our most popular software package is Trademate Core, which helps you beat the soft bookmakers, a.k.a, the bookmakers who are the easiest to beat.

The biggest limitation with betting against soft bookmakers like Bet365, Unibet and others, is that they eventually limit your bets down to $1 stakes.

So that’s why we created Trademate Pro, which supports three sharps bookmakers (SBOBET, Dafabet & Pinnacle) and two betting exchanges (Betfair & Matchbook).

By using either a sharp bookie or betting exchange, it allows you to not only bet for longer, but in most cases, stake more money, as they allow winning players to bet with them.

Trademate Pro is designed for the professional/aspiring professional sports bettor, or any individual wishing to generate a secondary income from trading in the Asian/Exchange betting markets.

We have never really posted an article or video about how to best use Trademate Pro for many reasons which we will state below. So hopefully this article gives you a bit more insight into how we perform against the shaper bookies, what kind of returns you can expect and how to best use the Pro software.

Key Points for Using Trademate Pro

1. It’s a tool

Unlike Trademate Core, where we give out hard-firm recommended presets and strategies for the soft bookmakers, when it comes to betting against the sharp bookmakers and exchanges, it’s a totally different ball game.

By placing thousands of trades with the soft bookies, our users have achieved an average ROI of 2.5% over millions of trades, just check out our live stats on our homepage.

The reason we rarely give out recommended presets or strategies for Trademate Pro is for two reasons; one, competition between peers and two, because you can’t start using Pro with minimal betting knowledge.

It’s very hard to find an edge in the Pro markets, so when you find one, the last thing you want is for someone to copy your edge to the point where they take the value from you. That would be very annoying. Luckily, against the soft bookies, you can get away with this as there are so many bookmakers and they don’t adjust their prices by the millisecond, so there is always a chance to snap up value, no matter what your peers are doing.

The second reason why we don’t give out strategies for Pro is the most important one to acknowledge. Trademate Pro is a tool, it is not a 100% full proof system for bettors at any level to start using and expect guaranteed profits. Sure we have a decent edge against bookies like SBOBET & Dafabet over a huge sample size, but when it comes to Betfair, Matchbook and Pinnacle it’s more challenging, so one needs to rely on their experience from trading betting markets to be successful. Overall, the main thing to note with this software package is that it is a tool. Unlike the Core package, you can change which benchmark you want to use for a certain sport, bookie and/or odds types (see below).

This is a useful tool for sports traders who might recognise a certain inefficiency at a bookmaker compared to another. Allowing them to change to their preferred benchmark and exploit that inefficiency at the other bookmaker/s.

This is why you need to be very experienced to use Trademate Pro and come in with the mindset of; “this is a tool which will help beat the markets, not do the whole job for me.” As it states in the description of Trademate Pro; “Trademate Pro is designed for the professional/aspiring professional sports bettor or any individual wishing to generate a secondary income from trading in the Asian/Exchange betting markets.”

2. Start with at least €20,000

We will go through the exact ROI’s we have against each bookmaker below, but it’s obviously a lot smaller than what we have against the soft bookmakers. Also, the subscription cost of Pro is more expensive than Core (€400/month & €1,000/quarter). So with a smaller ROI and bigger subscription cost to cover, you need to start with pretty big bankroll.

We recommend a minimum starting bankroll of €20,000 with Trademate Pro, but of course you can start with more. The key thing here is starting with a big enough bankroll so that you are covering the subscription cost and making enough profit on top of that to make it worth your while.

3. Exchange Commissions and Liquidity

The biggest problem we find with people trying to make money on the exchanges is overcoming the commission rate of both Betfair and Matchbook, and finding value at the same time. Note: When adding these exchanges to your bookmakers you can add the respective commission rates you have with them in the ‘Your Bookmakers’ section (see below).

So just keep in mind, that if you have a 5% commission rate with Betfair, you need an edge of at least 6%+ to be alerted of a trade and have long term profitability at the same time. Unfortunately, those kinds of huge edges are very hard to come by and when they do, it could be in a small league where there might not be enough liquidity in the market to get down the amount you want.

So if you’re thinking of using Trademate Pro, high commission rates at the exchanges don’t really lend well to the cause.

Looking at the User Data

Before we get into how we perform against all the sharp bookmakers and exchanges, it’s important to note some of the limitations of the data we will show you:

• Flat stake sizing of €1 per trade is used to remove the effect of users with large bankrolls skewing the results. Also, this way we can see whether our edge is based on beating the market, rather than the Kelly criterion.
• There is a chance that some of the bets in this data are duplicated as multiple customers could be placing the same bet. But the chances of this happening regularly are low as we have very few Pro customers using our software simultaneously.
• Some of the data we look at here is from our big data tool inside Trademate. The big data tool has a cap on 10,000 trades to speed up loading time, and those 10,000 trades are the most recent 10,000 trades within that filter.

Performance vs. SBOBET

As you will see, these two bookies are where we have performed best over the years, but recently SBOBET & Dafabet have been limiting customers a lot more frequently and basically changing their model to more of a soft bookmaker. We are hoping this is a temporary move and that after COVID they will resume normal service, but at the moment this is the current situation. All in all though, they will allow higher limits than your standard soft bookmaker. Let’s look at the data!

Reasonably low sample size for American Football, Baseball & Ice Hockey but we would still be confident in saying we have an edge against SBOBET in all of these sports, especially considering these are flat stakes. There is room to improve when implementing Kelly staking. As with a lot of this data, you can delve a bit deeper into odds types & ranges to see which are the most profitable/unprofitable segments. Especially with Soccer, as it is quite a big sample size it would be smart to have a look and see which odds types or ranges are reducing the ROI to 0.7%.

After looking at this data, here is a potential preset which should set you up pretty well:

Performance vs. Dafabet

Now let’s look at how we are going with Dafabet:

As you can see, it’s a lot harder to draw hard-firm conclusions from the Dafabet data as the sample size is simply not there for most of these sports, giving variance and randomness too much of an influence. Once again, Soccer looks good and we would recommend delving deeper into the big data tool to see exactly what’s working. The big thing to observe here is our performance on Basketball, a slight negative ROI after nearly 7,000 trades. So from just looking at this maybe it’s best to stay away from Basketball with Dafabet. But as always, take a deeper look into the big data tool and you might find that it's a certain odds type or range that is affecting the results heavily.

Here is a preset you could try with Dafabet, keeping in mind that the sample sizes for the other sports is too low to draw any conclusions:

Performance vs. Betfair Exchange

Unlike SBOBET & Dafabet, you could bet on the exchanges for your entire life and not have to worry about being limited down to pennies, so finding a profitable strategy here could be huge. But, like we stated before, the biggest problem with betting on the exchanges is liquidity and commission rates. Especially the latter, and you will notice how much that can skew your results by looking at the data below.

The data doesn’t look too enticing with Betfair. Low sample sizes for every sport other than Soccer, but there may be some potential there with Ice Hockey and Basketball. But let’s take a look at Soccer, because that is where we can draw the biggest conclusions from. As we mentioned before, the commission rate is the biggest issue. If you were able to use Betfair with a much lower commission or none at all, there is no doubt that it would be a great way of making money on Soccer. Out of curiosity, we tried a few different simulations in the big data tool to see if there were some profitable segments against Betfair, and after one try we came back with this for Recommended Leagues, Odds range 1-4, 1x2 bets and 0-8 hours before kick off.

It’s breakeven. But as we said before, you could now dig a bit deeper and see what odds range is working, because 1-4 is quite a big range. So overall, there is not much of an edge with Betfair Soccer betting, but if you have a reduced commission rate and dig deeper into the big data tool you might find a few openings!

Performance vs. Matchbook Exchange

A way more positive outlook for Matchbook, with some decent ROI’s and sample sizes for Soccer and Tennis. This will be mostly down to the reduced commissions at Matchbook, but the biggest problem will be the regularity of the trades coming through and the liquidity, as it is a less popular exchange than Betfair. But positive signs nonetheless, and a possible avenue for life-long profitability.

Performance vs. Pinnacle Sports

There is really not much to say about Pinnacle other than that they are the sharpest bookmaker in just about every sport. People might disagree with that when it comes to some American Sports and side with Betcris, but overall, you mostly can’t go wrong with following Pinnacle closing lines.

The sample sizes are way too small to draw any conclusions from our data, but they should be small as we do not recommend betting against Pinnacle as a general rule. The only time you should think about it is if you are essentially a professional sports bettor and have found a winning strategy. You can’t simply go in blind against Pinnacle like you can with SBOBET and Dafabet, you really need to know what you are doing.

So in summary, when it comes to Pinnacle, if you are going to bet against them, don’t base it upon any of the data above or in the big data tool, as the sample sizes are much too small. You need to base it upon your own models or strategies you have used over a long period of time. But this is an incredible tool to have at your disposal if you do find an edge somewhere against Pinnacle. Like the exchanges, Pinnacle generally don’t limit, so lifelong earnings are a possibility.

Performance vs. Betcris

This is a little bit left-field as you can use Betcris with Trademate Core. The reason we are bringing it up is because they are widely regarded as a slightly sharper bookmaker when it comes to betting on American Sports. But there is not much at all to split Pinnacle and Betcris as to who is sharper. Here is the data on them:

Looking at the sample sizes here and we can draw definitive conclusions from our performance against Soccer & Basketball. Firstly, we don’t need to discuss Soccer as Pinnacle is undoubtedly the bookmaker sharper there, but let’s look at Basketball more deeply.

The limits on the NBA for Betcris are big, so when you look at this data you will be thinking; "I could make a whole lot of money from this." BUT, after doing a bit of further investigation into how we perform against Betcris on Basketball, some very interesting discoveries were made.

The presets for both these simulations were the same; odds range 1-4 and 0-8 hours before kick off. The only difference being we did one simulation for recommended leagues and one for non-recommended leagues:

Recommended Leagues (NBA)

Non-recommended (Everything bar NBA)

This is a great example of how important it is to dig deeper with the data we are presenting you. As you can see, all of our positive results with Betcris Basketball is from everything non-NBA. We are unsure of how big the limits are on Betcris with leagues such as Euroleague, American College Basketball and so on, but we would assume they are less.

So whatever you do, don’t look at that data and think, “wow, I could make thousands betting NBA at Betcris”. You probably can’t using Trademate. But if the limits are good enough, you could achieve a decent ROI on every league that is not the NBA with Betcris.

Conclusion

We hope this has been a useful article to read and gives you a bit more perspective on how to get best use from Trademate Pro. As we stated at the start, the most important thing to keep in mind with this software package is that it’s a tool. You can’t walk in with no betting experience like with Trademate Core and make thousands of dollars, you need to have significant knowledge and understanding about sports betting. If you do, Trademate Pro is a great tool to work alongside of and hopefully make a lot more money than you can with the soft bookies.

As always, please send through your feedback and be aware that if you are a Pro customer you are more than welcome to ask any member of the Trademate team for some one-on-one feedback to improve your betting game!