When you?re trying to make it pay at any kind of gambling, you have to overcome an edge of some sort (unless you?re betting directly with a friend etc. but unfortunately this is technically illegal).

With the bookies, you?re going against the house in some way. On the exchanges, you have to overcome the circa five percent commission on winning bets.

So you have to exercise good judgement, of course, to beat the market. There are some people who manage this consistently with different systems in different sports. They may carefully study horse racing stats online or have a particular insight into different sports etc. But most ordinary punters don?t. They fall steadily behind as the slight margins paid one way or another take their steady toll.

One potential way around this is to keep it simple, only ever looking for sports with binary outcomes where all your analysis tells you the odds are even, and then backing the outsider of two. It?s exceedingly rare that you find both contestants in something at even money.

In a ?match? horse race or tennis final between two top contenders, or at snooker, boxing, or which team will progress in a football or rugby knockout tournament, there?s invariably one contestant slightly longer than the other.

The trick is in identifying those opportunities where the odds are very close, but where you think the slight outsider has an even chance ? then making sure you bargain hard for the best possible odds available.

If you have in-depth knowledge of any particular sport in this regard it can be an enormous help. But by consistently finding such opportunities, you should find you move steadily ahead as long as you have the self-discipline not to get top distracted. Just look for the close-run things, go for the slight outsider of the two where the outcomes are binary ? and see where the strategy takes you. And good luck.