I have been receiving selections and recording the performance of Football King for the last 3 months.
To refresh your minds, this is a football based laying service costing £39.50 per month (£89.50 per quarter), which uses a 150 point bank and aims to make 1 point per betting cycle. In other words it is a laying service with a loss recovery staking plan.
I have made no secret of the fact that the loss recovery part of this has had me nervous from the very start, but I must say that performance has been far better than I expected.
I really am very torn on this one. That’s why there have been fewer updates during the trial.
From a purely results driven point of view, this would be Approved.
From an admin and ease of use point of view, this would be Approved.
So why the hesitation?
I can’t shake the feeling that this will, almost certainly, fall over at some point and if it happens during the early part of your membership it will take your entire bank with it.
I received selections for a few days before our trial officially started and there was a hefty losing run during that period. The first two weeks of the trial were good and we made regular one point gains for fairly low overall liability. But then we hit a losing run, a long one..11 losses in a row. The twelfth bet meant that we had over £800 worth of accumulated liability. Bear in mind we are trying to win £10 here. 80 points to win 1. A cover bet was advised to help out but had that game gone heavily against us (and we were laying a team at 1.30) the bank would have been all but gone. We had other troublesome losing runs, one got to 35 points, several others got into double figures.
So, there you have my dilemma.
Has it made money? YES
Is it reliably run and easy to use? YES
Are the fees reasonable? YES
Would I personally use it, or let a friend use it? NO
The figures are very decent. It has made 51 points (£510 at £10 a point) in the 3 months I have been reviewing it. That figure is after Betfair commission at 2% as you build that into your target stake.
That’s a really nice return, but basic statistics will tell you that, given the strike rate of around 32%, you could reasonably expect to hit a losing run of around 18-20 bets in any given 1000 bet sample. That would kill this and take your bank with it.
Given my extermely mixed feeling on it I will mark it as NEUTRAL. I am sure it will make you some money over the short to medium term, but at some point you’ll hit the wall and if it happens before you’ve built up your winnings, it could be fatal.
