The New Season Approaches

 It doesn't seem five minutes ago that we were getting ourselves out of a bit of a late-season hole we'd dug at Betting Emporium by cleaning up on the Super Bowl. In the early weeks of the season I was having one of those runs when I couldn't seem to lose and I followed it with one where I just couldn't win. It turned out to be a bit of a nothing year. I've decided to react in my normal way and just read everything I could find, think long and hard about where I went wrong and which bits worked well and plan to make this season better. The good news for you is I plan to share all my bets and, as my maths teacher always insisted, all my workings. Subscribers can find out what bets I'm having and read the reasons why. I just thought I'd write a few words in advance to tell you up front what you'll be getting for your money and when.

 Those of you who follow the site regularly will be pleased to have followed Redarmi with his Pre-Season NFL coverage which we offered for free. Stu is a big fan of the sport, one of the cleverest gamblers I know and someone I follow without question. I shall certainly be consulting him to gain his NFL thoughts and that should help. Hopefully you'll have also read the free previews of the long-term NFL markets which Tighty has worked hard on. I think they are great and if you haven't seen them yet then I'd really recommend you do. A lot of those prices are still around so you still have a chance to benefit.

 In the spirit of offering things for free I shall be doing a write-up on all the Thursday games for free this year. You simply need to be registered to the site and you'll see my thoughts on the game and any bets I decide to have on them. We are literally going to be telling you only the bets that I personally place so sometimes I won't have one at all, but at 7pm every Thursday I will put up all my thoughts plus any bets.

 On Sundays the action really hots up. There are around twelve games a week and I'll usually find four, five or six bets with perhaps a little over half of those being on the totals. Last year I would start working on writing up every game, explaining the factors I was considering, at 9am, and then I'd have them with you for noon. I will be doing that again this year and then at 4pm, after a period of reflection and a time to take in the later market moves, I will decide on the stakes I recommend on each bet, and which ones from the shortlist should be included and which left out. That should ensure we have all the most up-to-date information but you also get a couple of hours to do the bets. As with all recommended bets on Betting Emporium we will not simply pick off out of date prices available with just one or two firms and we won't bother suggesting bets with some of the firms who hang out on Oddschecker pretending to be bookmakers. We are proud of the results we have achieved at Betting Emporium but we are particularly proud that they have all been achieved by making bets at prices that are relatively easy to obtain.

 If you wish to see the kind of things I cover and the detail I go into with my write-ups on each game you can easily find all of last year's write-ups on the site. Lots of readers were kind enough to say that even on the losing weeks they found the reasoning useful and it helped them to confirm bets they were thinking about, or perhaps more importantly to avoid losers they would have had otherwise. You'll see from the write-ups that I don't tend to spend a lot of time talking about the things that the regular media discuss when assessing a game. My writing will always focus on the betting aspect of the game and I'll always be attempting to consider aspects that may effect the result which have either not been considered by the market, or in my opinion, have not been factored heavily enough. I'm a big fan of the big betting syndicates and I'll always attempt to mirror their approach in this sport.

  One thing that will be different from last year is my staking plan. Joe and I have had a few recent conversations with the other pros on the site and it's occurred to us that our staking when considering each sport and measuring them against each other, may not be quite right. We think that 8 points on a horse bet at 33/1 and then having 8 points on an NFL game at 10/11 may mean that we aren't really staking enough on NFL and when looking at the overall results on the site the sports with prices closer to evens may be overshadowed by those where the prices are bigger. We think that the stakes we have been recommending on those sports are not really representative of the bets we are actually placing. Last year we tending to bet between 8 and 12 points on each bet with 1 point being the minimum and 20 points the maximum. This year I shall be working on a range of 1 point to 50 points and with around five bets a week I'll be staking around 110-130 points with an average bet of 22 to 25 points.

 Many people who are considering subscribing to Betting Emporium ask how much they should bet and the answer never really gets much easier. I can say that I would be very happy with an ROI of 8% in this sport and 5% would be decent. Winning with 55% of bets is considered excellent in the long-term and that tends to be what happens to me with NFL. That means that over a 17 week season I'll have around 85 bets and I'll win 47 and lose 38, so if I suggest average bets of 24 points you'll stake 2040 points and if all bets are 10/11 you'll win 113 points for an ROI of just over 5%.

 So if you think you are a £5 a point kind of guy then most of your bets will be between £100 and £150, you'll be betting £10,200 over the year and you'll win £565. Of course it's possible that we lose and sometimes we'll have a fantastic year and you'll win over a thousand. You will be paying us £199 for the subscription so I would suggest that you should probably not consider buying if you plan to bet £3 a pont or less and at £4 or £5 it's a tricky decision. It's highly unlikely that at £5 a point you'll fall more than £2,000 behind even in a really bad season and it's very likely that you won't need to have £10,200 all at one time, but it's important to consider exactly what could happen.

 I would say the decisions on these things are very individual.

 On Mondays we have the final game of each week. I shall be doing write-ups for these to people who subscribe to the package. I'll be publishing those on the site at 7pm on Mondays and that will give you plenty of time to get the bets on before the game.

 As a final point before the games commence let me remind you that one way you can really push up your ROI on this sport in particular is to have access to a wide variety of accounts. Although our selections will be recorded in the results section at the prices that are freely available with at least two firms, and excluding the complete jokers that are out there, it can't help to have those accounts available so that you can get the best of the market. Until Sunday that would be a great job to do here.

 Hopefully you'll join me and we'll have a great season.

- Neil

Please have a look at the various bookmakers on this page, and the offers that you can get by opening your accounts through Bettingemporium. The one account, if you don't already have it, that you will find invaluable during the NFL season is a PinnacleSports account. They are very often best price and bet to much smaller margins than the UK high street firms. As a result they can often make the difference between winning and losing. Open your Pinnacle account here

The NFL Regular Season 2014 runs from September 4^th – December 28^th 2014

Neil Channing will be providing his legendary write ups on all the games every week for the 17 weeks of regular games.