Updated: Aug 13, 2020 6:35 am
There are many tactics in the world of sports betting. One of the best is hedging. Hedging your soccer bets means you are taking action to improve your chances of winning. An example might be if you bet on Manchester City to win the Premier League title at the start of the season. If it was a close finish, you might not be confident that the bet will win. In these circumstances, you have two different options. The first of them is simple: let the bet ride. In the event of Manchester City failing to win the Premier League, you would lose. This means you are out of pocket.
But the other way could guarantee that you make some money from your bets. For this example, let’s say Liverpool are the closest challenges to Manchester City for the title. If you were to place an additional bet on Liverpool to win the league title, this would be a hedge. Of course, how much money you would make depends on the odds of both bets. Hedging is also used as a tactic to protect yourself from sustaining too many losses on a wager. So what do you need to do to hedge your soccer bets? Read on to find out!
Hedging your soccer bets – the basics
You can hedge your soccer bets on a single game, and long-term wagers covering the whole season. Let’s say you have placed a correct score bet on a game between Liverpool and Everton. The wager you set was for the game to end in a goalless draw. At the 60-minute mark, the score is still Liverpool 0-0 Everton and your bet is on track to be a winner. But if you are watching the game and you feel like there is a goal coming, hedging is an option. You could place a further bet on over 0.5 goals being scored in the game. Or if one team was looking likelier to score, you might instead back them to win the match.
As well as your chosen bookmaker, a betting exchange is an excellent tool for hedging bets. This is because you can lay a bet, and to back it. Laying a bet means gambling against an event happening in a soccer game. So you could lay the 0-0 scoreline if you backed it earlier. There are various hedging betting strategies you can use in soccer bets, but those are the basics.
Using hedging to minimise risk in your soccer bets
Hedging bets can be used in two different ways: to lock in profit or to mitigate potential losses. Both are valid betting strategies that many people use to an exceptional level of success in soccer bets. Losing is sometimes inevitable in soccer betting. The sport is more predictable than most, so some results will take everyone who has put a bet on by complete surprise. But you can use hedging to reduce the amount of money you lose when one of these results happens.
This is a key way to ensure long-term success when it comes to soccer bets. Winning every single wager that you put on is never going to happen, after all. So when you do lose, you can use hedging to cut your losses and ensure you have more cash to play with on your next bet.
Locking in profit by hedging soccer bets
The other way to use hedging in soccer bets is to lock in a portion of guaranteed profit. In effect, this is what happens if you choose to use the cash-out function on a bookmaker website. When you do this, you have hedged your bets by gambling against bets that are not proven to be the winner. It is possible to manually hedge your soccer bets without using a cash-out option, of course. Cash-out offers do not always tend to be very good value, so doing it yourself is often a better move.
To lock in profit, simply back the opposite option to your initial wager. So let’s say you have backed Liverpool to win that game against Everton. Liverpool lead 1-0 going into the last 20 minutes. It looks like your soccer bet will be a winner. But you can never be sure. In this situation, it could be helpful to place a double chance bet on Everton. This means that whatever happens in the last 20 minutes of the game, one of the bets is going to win. Depending on the stakes involved and the odds that are offered, you can lock in profit this way.
Hedging your soccer bets is a valuable betting strategy, so it is well worth using it on your wagers.
