Track Your Bets

July 7, 2023

Boring 😴

He’s not going on about this again is he? Yes I am. And I will continue to preach about the importance of tracking your bets until the day I die (bit over dramatic).

If you already track your bets then by all means stop reading. If you’re a casual gambler with no interest in beating the bookies then you can toddle off as well.

But for those of you that are keen to make a profit from this pastime and are not currently tracking your bets, stay put and keep reading.

There are a number of ways you can track your bets. If you’re old school you can simply buy yourself a notebook and write you wagers down using pen and paper. That does mean you’ll have to calculate the results yourself and tally up the overall profit etc.

For those more in tune with the modern day era, google sheets is an excellent free tool for creating your own spreadsheet. It’s the method I used for tracking my bets until recently.

The third option is to use a third party platform like bettin.gs. This is currently how I track my bets. The benefits of this is that it can speed up the data entry work and it will calculate all the profit and loss for you.

It will also categorise your bets into bookmakers, sport, tipsters, etc. This would be my recommendation although it does cost a small monthly fee (£10) if you want to use the more advanced pro version.

What information should you include when you track your bets? Well here is list of what I input into my bettin.gs account and what I’ve used in the past on google sheets.

Event/Match

I always start with the event. So it might be a football match, for example “Arsenal v Manchester United”. You might be backing a golfer in a tournament, so the event could be “US Masters”.

Selection

The next entry will the selection itself. So taking the above example it might be “Over 2.5 Goals” or “Rory Mcilroy to Miss the Cut” (soz Rors). The benefit of using a platform such as bettin.gs is they have a database of events and selections. So if you started typing Arse…. it would then give you the options to quickly and easily autofill your entry.

Stake

An obvious entry, but without it you won’t be able to calculate your return and profit/loss. I enter my stake using the pts system as that’s pretty much universal these days across all tipsters. It’s based on my stake of £10 per point. So I know if I’ve entered 1 as the stake, that relates to £10. You might prefer to enter the amount you wagered in your chosen currency.

Odds

Again crucial to the tracking of your results. When using bettin.gs or google sheets you”ll need to use decimal odds. I mean who’s using fractional odds anyway? If you are, you’re probably using a fountain pen and leather bound notebook, using calligraphy no doubt to record your bets.

Bookmaker

Tracking which bookmaker you use is very important when you check the settlement of your bets. Bookmakers make mistakes and from time to time and they will settle a winning bet as a losing bet. It happens. If you compare your tracking to your bookmaker account you’ll be able to ensure if this does happen you spot it and don’t get screwed over.

Tipster

If you are following a large number of tipsters like I am, you want to know the breakdown of which of those experts is making you money and which is having a poor run. Using a site like bettin.gs will list your tipsters stats in great detail.

I can see how many bets, my profit/loss, the win rate, average stake, average results, the list goes on. If you use a paper and pen or google sheets, that’s something you will need to calculate yourself.

Result

Again, using the first two methods, you’ll need to include the result itself. On Bettin.gs you can just click Win or Lose and then everything automatically updates for you. A spreadsheet can include formula which will calculate your profit/loss, but you will still need to enter the return from that bet first.

That’s pretty much it folks. I’ve had spells in my 25 years of gambling where I’ve tracked and bet casually. I can tell you the difference in my profit/loss was huge. Without accountability you can get lazy and the losses pile up without reaslising.