One of the first questions people ask when they start trading or betting on Betfair is surprisingly simple: How big should my trading bank be? £100? £500? £1,000? £10,000? It sounds like a straightforward question. In reality, there is no sensible answer until you know something much more important: what is the bank expected to survive? A strategy with a 70% strike rate and average odds of 1.50 has a completely different risk profile from one operating at average odds of 12.0

The draw might be the most ordinary bet in football. Every Match Odds market gives us the same three basic choices: Home, Draw or Away. Punters have been backing draws forever. There are countless draw systems built around goals, league tables, previous results, expected goals, team strength and every other conceivable filter. Our latest Research Lab experiment starts somewhere much simpler. What happens if we stop trying to identify which matches are likely to draw and just

At 5:30pm on 3 October 2026, I switched on another automated football research collector. I gave it what seemed like a perfectly sensible working name: Football Underdog. A couple of days and 130 bets later, I've realised the name is wrong. When we talk about a football underdog, we normally mean the weaker team. Cádiz play Leganés, for example, and the market makes Cádiz the least-fancied of the three Match Odds outcomes. Our collector backs Cádiz. They don't just sneak it e