A bet tracker is a tool that enables you to record the bets you've made and the outcome of those bets.
This can come in a variety of forms. It could be a simple notebook, an excel spreadsheet, a dedicated tracking tool like futstats.net or increasingly account management tools / statements provided by online bookmakers.
A preliminary question is: Do you actually need a bet tracker? If you place only a few bets a week for fun and just have one or two accounts then probably not.
However, if you have more than a couple of accounts (e.g. for matched betting) or you want to evaluate how different strategies perform in comparison to others, then tracking bets in some way can help you get a full picture of your bets and their performance. Let's take a look in detail at some of the benefits of tracking your bets.
Bankroll management is an important element of any serious strategy. You need to know what funds you have available, and futher, you will often need this information to calculate stake sizes. This is difficult to do when when funds are spread across multiple accounts.
One popular approach is to use "Kelly Staking", the details of which are beyond the scope of this present article, however the basic premise is that appropriate stakes can be calculated based on (very simply) the amount of your current bankroll to minimize loses, while maximizing value. see: Kelly Criterion (Wikipedia)
A bet tracker is a useful tool to help you evaluate the performance of different strategies and approaches. Maybe, you like placing each-way bets and want to know whether Golf or Horse Racing is providing better returns?
You may have different strategies, perhaps looking to profit from some bookmaker offers such as "2up" while also taking advantage of bookmaker Acca offers. Being able to tag and track the returns on different approaches and types of betting helps you focus your energies better.
Evaluation of different strategies and approaches is sometimes based on "return on investment" (ROI) and yield. A bet tracker will enable you to calculate figures for these metrics.
It's useful to reflect on how your betting is going. Are you betting too much? Are you profitable? This is absolutely fundamental to any strategy. Bet tracking tools will also often enable you to make notes and tag bets to help you later reflect in more detail and log learning.
For some types of betting, such as matched betting, that involve the use of lay bets the liability of these can sometimes be quite high and it's important to ensure calculations are correct. A bet tracker will enable you to better identify where an error has been made (e.g. forgetting to lay, or laying the incorrect outcome - it happens!).
A bet tracker, of some description - however rudimentary, is essential if you place a high volume of bets across multiple bookmakers.
A final note in this section, and one that certainly applies to myself, is that tracking bets and keeping an eye on the stats can be rewarding and interesting. Rewarding to see the fruits of your labour and interesting in terms of being a stat geek (tragic I know!).
This depends on your style of betting and the type of strategy you employ. All bets should probably be logged - which can be quite labourious - therefore it's import to find a bet tracking solution that is as efficient as possible.
In terms of tracking every penny, this may depend on the strategy. In some strategies, where margins can be small, it's import to track things closely, although worrying about every penny might be overkill. Remember time is money and so we really don't want to spend too much time on admin - just the minimum and done most efficiently to enable us to analyse our positions.
For some exchanges it can be very difficult to accurately track an account closely as the commissions charged can vary with volume. For some types of strategies getting too held up on details can be counter productive. Again, using matched betting as an example, the expected value of positions can sometimes be quite small (50p to 1GBP) and the profits come from volume. In such cases, a simple periodic review of accounts might be sufficient.
This section reviews some of the key features that you would hope to see in a bet tracker. Some of these are essential, whereas others are just nice to have and save a bit of time.
A bet tracker should enable you to track the main types of bets that you are likely to place. This would include; singles, multiples and each-way bets. It should also enable you log both back and lay bets.
A good bet tracking tool should be as efficient as possible to save you time from administrative chore of completing the log. This can be things such as auto-completing dates, match information and perhaps your standard stake amounts.
Where appropriate, a bet tracker should be integrated with any calculators, saving you the effort of having to enter data multiple times.
A bet tracker should enable you to find bets easily - perhaps by status: pending; open; and closed.
Bet trackers should also enable you to provide reports on the data - this is usually done via some form of dashboard that gives an overview of key metrics and status (number bets, profit and bankroll).
It's useful to be able to make notes and reminders on bets. So a good bet tracker will enable you to tag bets or add your own notes.
A bet tracker should calculate the outcome of bets for you. This would involve taking the odds, and based on whether a bet is marked as won, then the overall profit / loss can be calculated automatically.
For some kinds of bets, such as each-way bets, this can be complicated due to additional rules governing how place are calculated.
"Auto-settlement" or "auto-close" is a feature that will 'look-up' the outcome of an event and depnding on the result, mark the bet as winning or losing (and calculate any profit-loss).
This feature can save a significant amount of time and is a big advantage that online dedicated tools have over simpler systems such as using Excel.
Finally, to counter to some of the above, with every additional feature comes more complexity. For every feature there can be an overhead in terms of setup, and in some cases, data entry.
There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple. There's certainly no shame in using Excel, indeed many bettors would prefer to keep in control of this and enjoy playing around in spreadsheets. Doing so can sometimes be a time-sink though.
It's a case of finding a tool that you are comfortable with that best meets your needs. If I were to offer advice, it would probably be to set up a simple Excel or Google docs spreadsheet in the first instance and see how this works for you. Further, this process can be useful in terms of learning - for example, with calculating profits etc.
Finally, we'll review some options. I'm not going to provide a list of alternatives in some form of faux Top 10 list which are so prevalent on the interweb. This is the futstats.net site and the purpose of this article is to discuss bet tracking in general and some of the features one finds - and to provide, in this section, details of the features of our own bet tracker.
There are many alternatives out there. Googling "online bet tracker" should give plenty of options. There is a wide range in terms of quality, features and also at different price points. We hope the discussion above helps you in evaluating the many options available.
As mentioned above, a spreadsheet is a good solution. These have the benefit that they can easily be changed and improved over time. However, as also mentioned previously it can take time to do this.
Excel and Google sheets have the big advantage of being quick, simple and of course are free. They can become cumbersome over time if you place a lot of bets.
There are plenty of template bet trackers available in Excel online. Google "Excel bet tracker" and you should get plenty of results.
Right, so let's introduce you to the futstats.net bet tracker. A brief video introduction can be found on our youtube channel here. The bet tracker has all of the features highlighted in our earlier review. These include:
If this sounds like something that would be of interest to you, please get in touch and we'd be happy to offer you a free trial so you can test aspects of the bet tracker functionality.
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