Those of you who have been following @InplayMan for a while may have heard me mention this phrase a few times, so I thought I'd write a betting guide on it for those of you who have never heard me say it before. It was actually something an old friend of mine told me about a decade ago and something that has stuck with me ever since.
Here's a secret for you....bookies love punters who back accas. Why? Well because it's what makes them the most money. Now I completely understand that there are those punters out there who like a little acca on a Saturday, and that's absolutely fair enough, we've all done it. But the transition from casual weekend punter to something you can make some actual money from comes in the transition from backing crazy multiples to backing singles.
The more selections you add into an acca, not only the harder it is to win, but the more that the bookies margin compounds across those selections. If you are an acca backer through and through, then go back across your bets and just weigh up how many of them land vs not and you'll soon find out how much profit they get you.
Now the temptation of course comes from seeing those bets on social media where Dave from Wolverhampton landed a £150,000 20-fold from a £1 bet. And who is sharing this? Well the bookies obviously. They want nothing more than punters to be slapping these kind of bets on every week, because for every 250,000 of them that are placed, only one wins, sometimes not even one.
Just forget about teams for a second and consider this. Lets say you're backing 10 teams to win, nice and simple right. Well for each one of those games there are three possible outcomes for the game, home win, draw or away win. 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 59,049
That means there are nearly 60,000 possible combinations of results in those games, regardless of who is playing who. You're banking on 1 of those 60,000 combinations landing, compared to a single where you're backing 1 of 3 possible combinations. Sure, the returns reflect this and there may be some of you who out there who want to go for glory on your bets, but if you want to make a long term profit from betting, there's only one tried and trusted method...singles for dough, accas for show!