Free football predictions: a beginner's guide
The three markets, how to read a fixture, and the mistakes that cost beginners their Arenas.
The three football markets
- Winner — home, draw or away. The safest, the least rewarding, and the one to start with.
- Exact score — the hardest market in football, and the one that pays most. Even a perfect read of a match rarely lands it.
- Over / under 2.5 goals — whether the match produces three goals or more. Often the most predictable of the three, because it depends on styles rather than on who is better.
You can hold all three on the same match, and change any of them until the market closes. Covering the three is the single most effective habit: same match, three chances to earn.
Reading a fixture without any inside knowledge
- Recent form: each match page lists the last results of both sides, taken from our own database.
- Previous meetings: some fixtures are historically tight regardless of the table.
- What the community picked: the percentages tell you where the crowd is, which is useful precisely because the crowd is often wrong.
- The competition: a cup tie between mismatched sides behaves nothing like a league game between neighbours.
Four beginner mistakes
- Only betting on the team you support. Affection is not information.
- Chasing the exact score every time: it is the rarest outcome, so it should be a bonus, not a strategy.
- Waiting until kick-off. The market closes 10 minutes before, and it closes for everyone.
- Skipping the boosted match of the week, which pays double for the same work.
How your prediction is settled
On the full-time score published by our football data provider. If no result ever arrives, the match is voided and nobody loses anything — the rules are on the data and method page.