Top 5 Bets For Your Football Acca
Choosing which markets to bet on for each game or even each acca that you place, can be tough. You just need to log onto any of the bigger bookies and you will be greeted with hundreds of betting markets for each game each day.
It’s an intimidating amount and if you’re new to acca betting, it’s something that you want to keep away from.
When I’m forming my picks, there are only a handful of markets that I like to look at. These are often markets that I am familiar with and also ones that I can quickly determine if they offer good value or not.
Granted, spotting value early is something that you learn and takes time to master, but by cutting out over 90% of the betting markets for most games, it does become a lot easier.
Some of you will be wondering if you are losing value by dismissing so many markets and to be honest, you could argue that yes, you are, but realistically, going through hundreds of markets for each game is not plausible for most and is way too much work.
Below I’ve listed the markets that I follow for my accumulator picks. It’s quite interesting that as I was talking this through with Dave, he has a similar sort of layout for his tips.
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Top 5 Markets For Football Accumulators
#1 Match result
The match result is the most common market that I use when placing my acca bets. For those that don’t know what this is… I’m referring to the home win, draw and away win options.
I’ve spoken in detail about this and how I use this market to form my bets in an earlier blog post on picking football accumulators, so jump over there for an in-depth look… I do however want to include some info on here about the process here, which is think is important.
You must be looking to find value from these bets (and all your bets). You need to have a look and find games that you think have an overwhelming chance of a certain result and then try to create your own odds from there
You can do this simply by giving an implied probability for each result. This means the percentage based on the likelihood of this event happening.
For example, you determine the following:
- Team A to win = 55% = 1.82
- Draw = 25% = 4.00
- Team B to win = 20% = 5.00
Let’s assume that a bookmaker is offering odds of 2.00 on Team A to win. You think that the odds are higher than their actual chances of winning, which then means that you have found value.
Generally, I like the match result market because it’s the easiest to asses and once you get used to searching for value here it starts to pop out at you straight away when looking over a list of daily matches.
It’s also perfect for beginners because it’s simple.
#2 Over 2.5 Goals
This market is all about goals and the bet is essentially saying that you need to have 3 or more goals combined in the game.
I have been known to alter this market a little and take the over 1.5 or even the over 3.5 goals of some games, but I find that 2.5 offers a happy medium for most bets at the price point (1.50 to 3.00) that I’m looking for.
What I will state at this point is that I don’t ever bet on the under 2.5 goals and that’s not because I don’t like the bet, but it’s one that can destroy acca bets very quickly.
For example… if you have a game where you’ve bet on the under and there is a random glut of goals within 20 minutes, your whole acca could be finished before it’s even got going. By taking the over you’re never really out of it until the very dying stages of any game.
For this bet, I’m looking at previous games played between both teams and also the previous head to heads. Are there are any stats that would point towards taking this on or are there certain results that may suggest there could be goals in this game?
Purely from a numbers point of view, any team averaging 65%+ of games over 2.5 goals are a serious consideration. If this is the case and their opponents are averaging over 50%, this tells me that it’s at least worth looking into to see if a potential bet is on the cards.
Obviously finishing with me comparing my assessment of the chance of over 2.5 goals vs the bookies to determine if the bet offers value or not.
Asian Handicap
I love the Asian Handicap and much prefer it over the traditional handicap market as either you win or you lose (this is done by adding a .5 to the handicap amount meaning the draw is impossible).
The market is best used on short-priced favourites for me.
I could count on one hand how often I included the likes of Man City to win a game without an Asian Handicap applied and that’s because, at odds of 1.30 or even lower, which they often are for pretty much all Premier League games, they offer very little value, even as part of an acca.
I know that teams like City are going to win the majority of their games and they are going to win a lot of them very comprehensively. The -1.5 handicap is my go-to, and this means that the team needs to win by 2 or more goals.
You need to be a little careful with handicaps as to not get too greedy and I certainly wouldn’t recommend applying them in games which you think might be tight.
It’s one of the most underused betting markets for accumulator bets in the industry in my opinion and as long as you apply even a basic amount of knowledge and common sense, you can start to squeeze value out of the short-priced favourites.
Both Teams to Score (BTTS)
This bet has been the one that has shot to fame over the last few years. I think it’s on the back of the success of Goals Galore, set up by Betfred, which allows players to choose games from a long list of matches for a set price.
The concept of the bet is very simply in that you need to choose a game with both teams scoring at least 1 goal each. The final result here is irrelevant and all you are doing is looking for goals.
BTTS is a personal favourite of mine and one that I’ve had great success with. I’ve won several bets direct from Betfred’s Goals Galore list and would highly recommend checking it out at Betfred (you get enhanced odds on BTTS acca’s).
I like to run the numbers with this bet and the vast majority of my research will be based on this. A good stats site will show you the BTTS percentage for each team and this is a great guide for which games to include.
A huge mistake that I see is people taking stats for total goals or the over/under percentages and applying it to the BTTS market. You could have a team that average 3 goals per game, but that could be because they get hammered each week. Make sure the data that you take is relevant to this market.
Double chance
I’ve spoken previously about the fact that I want to take the favourite for the majority of my bets, but I do look to see if I can find value from the other bets as well. There are times when my numbers will move me towards both the draw and the underdog.
If I’m being honest, I don’t like taking them on as single bets as I find them too risky. If I do, then they are part of a daft double or maybe treble, but I’m never that keen on it. I do like combining these bets with double chance markets though as they can offer great value here.
For those that don’t know, the double chance bet is where you take on two results, instead of one. The combinations are:
- Home win and draw
- Away win and draw
- Home win and away win
You just need one of the two results to come in for the bet to win. The odds are short for this though and if you take the shortest price result and the second shortest price result, then you’re going to be looking at unbackable prices of around 1.10 or maybe even less.
I like these to include the two least likely results (according to odds) and whilst they will still be short in price, should be enough value to get our teeth stuck into.
Let’s role with our odds example from the Match Result section above and see how this might work:
- Team A to win = 55% = 1.82
- Draw = 25% = 4.00
- Team B to win = 20% = 5.00
We get onto the bookmaker and see that they are offering the following odds:
- Team A to win = 1.65
- Draw = 6.00
- Team B to win = 8.00
Team A to win is not offering very good odds at all based on our research, sitting at odds of 1.65 where we are looking more at 1.82. But, both the draw and the Team B to win result are offering great value and priced much higher than what we think is their “true odds”.
This could offer a great chance to take on both the draw and the away win, knowing that we have value in both results. If this is priced anywhere around even money, then it’s a massive price in a game we think one of the results has a decent chance of landing.
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