If you are new to SharpBetting you probably have a few questions. Maybe even more than a few. In this article, we cover the most-common questions that have been put to us in emails, on social media and during face-to-face conversations with new members.
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THE BACKGROUND
Who are we?
Chris Fawcett and David Hipkin have been business partners since 2019. They set up SharpBetting.co.uk in 2024 having tested their betting models with the soft sportsbooks in the UK for the best part of two years. Having exhausted what was possible to win off the UK market, it was an easy decision to offer up the service to the public.
With decades of experience and expertise in Horse Racing and Boxing betting, as well as the methodologies that support our football and other sports models, the SharpBetting site quickly gained a lot of attention for it's innovative approach, products, and transparency.
Betting People
- In August 2024, Chris sat down with Simon Nott (of Betting People fame) to discuss his extensive background in the sports betting world.
- A few months later, David was invited to the StarSports Mayfair head-quarters to discuss his background and latest projects.
If it works, why do we give it away?
Of course, this is a regular question we get asked. In this video, Chris goes back over two decades of his experience to explain the nexus of the SharpBetting products. How they work, why they work, and why they are available to our members.
First-hand experience
- David
David was the first to use the SharpBetting system, the one that is now publicly available, at scale. Over the course of 4 months, he spent 100 hours of his spare time using the live feed. In that time, he made over £8,000 in profit from the UK sportsbooks. In real-time, as it happened, he documented every step of the way. That blog can be found by clicking here.
- Leah
Next up came Leah. Leah is one of Chris's close friends and the first member of staff, after the founders. Without having any experience of football, or betting on anything outside of Love Island, Leah was the perfect candidate to use the live system. Two months into her SharpBetting "journey", David met her for an impromptu update chat about her own unique onboarding experience. Ultimately she reached £7,500 in profit before calling it a day. You can read her thoughts on the process, the highs and the lows, here.
- Chris
Meanwhile, Chris was stepping up his activity and had introduced multiples into the mix. To this point, David and Leah were strictly betting singles-only. Chris was able to maintain activity for almost 18 months, during which time he made a profit in excess of £100,000. You can watch Chris and David discussing this achievement on YouTube.
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GETTING STARTED
We refer to the SharpBetting members' site as "the app". The app will work on all of your devices; desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.
User-guide
What is the difference between the bet colours in the live feed? This, and every other main question about the functionality of the app is addressed in the SharpBetting UserGuide.
FAQs
We have a short list of Frequently Asked Questions that will provide a high-level answer to most of the main questions we get. You can scan through them here.
System Overview
For those who want to learn more, we recommend looking at the System Overview article that you can read by clicking here.
Telegram
Although it is certainly not essential to use it, the SharpBetting service works nicely for members who are on Telegram. Getting set up on Telegram to interact with the SharpBetting bot takes just a few seconds. A step-by-step guide to how to get going, how to configure notifcations, and what else can be done with Telegram is available here.
There is also a short video intro of how it works here.
The Smart Betting Club Review
We don't need to share testimonials on this page since you've got this far, but it is worth mentioning that in April 2025, after 1500 bets had been published as part of the David's Daily service, The Smart Betting Club published an impartial and very detailed deep-dive analysis piece. You can sign-up and read the review in full here.
Priming of Accounts
Priming of accounts is an interesting topic. How much it helps in increasing the lifespan of a betting account with a soft ("recreational") sportsbook is up for debate. But it stands to reason that making your SharpBetting behaviour appear to share as many traits with recreational behaviour as possible cannot be a bad thing. In this video, David presents a few ideas he has employed to appear recreational.
Did priming work for us? Hard to say, but during our peak activity while winning upwards of £15,000 in a month, we would often be given hundreds of pounds of free bets.
Variance and Betting on Exchanges
The SharpBetting system was designed to beat the soft books. We have never tested the service at scale on the Exchanges as it never met our requirements in terms of the amount of activity we were able to get for the best part of two years with the traditional sportsbooks. Some of our members have reported getting on at better prices on Betfair etc. but this is not something we would actively promote as part of the service. The video here explains some of the reasons for this.
Starting Stakes and Paper-Trading
The topic of what stakes should be used when subscribing to a SharpBetting service is a very difficult one to respond to. It is entirely subjective. The first piece of advice is to understand that the reason the subscriptions are so reasonably priced is that we want members to be with us for months (perhaps even years) not weeks. This is not a get-rick-quick scheme.
Do members need to place every bet in the live feed? Absolutely not. Every bet in the system is +EV (positive Expected Value) so it does not matter which ones are taken and which ones are ignored. The main thing is that it fits into the individual's lifestyle. Bets can be found in the feed around the clock 365/24/7.
There is an article here that introduces some concepts about how to start off the SharpBetting journey at a sensible pace, in order to get familiar with the swings in fortune (good and bad) and to become comfortable that this is very much a marathon, not a sprint.
Staking Strategies
Flat stakes or Sharp stakes? Both systems work in the long-run and we share performance data and analysis using both approaches. Strictly speaking, a sharp stakes method is our preferred approach. This reduces the variance, but the downside is that the big-price winners (like this 45/1 shot in the 1X2!) do not create the same excitement as a flat stake bet would have. Before starting SharpBetting, it is worth considering which approach you wish to take. There is an article that introduces the concepts here.
After 1750 bets provided in the David's Daily service, the different Profit/Loss lines are shown here. You can check the daily performance of both of these staking strategies here.
Additionally, if you wish to drill into every single bet ever picked in David's Daily, you can interogate the results data here. (As of 5-May-2025, flat-Stake betting has a Return-On-Investment of 16.7% and a P-Value of 0.00017, which suggests that 1-in-6059 bettors could achieve these results by luck.)
Bet Tracking vs Balance Tracking
We are sometimes asked if we plan to introduce Bet Tracking functionality to the app. This is the process of storing all "placed" bets in the system for members to analyse their performance. There are a number of reasons why this functionality is not a priority at the moment (we are focussing on more sports, more books, more markets).
Instead, we suggest, where possible, a simple "Balance Tracking" methodology for measuring SharpBetting performance over time. The main reason we encourage this approach over manual bet tracking is simply down to the time taken to enter each bet in a spreadsheet, although we fully understand some members will want to have all of their betting history recorded in bet-by-bet detail.
As far as the performance of David's Daily (which is taken directly from the live feed) is concerned, we provide thorough Bet History and Analysis of every bet, every day, every week, every month, since inception. It can be reviewed here.
Time of Betting
During the "Road to 8k" blog, all bets were placed within 24 hours of the start of the match. When broken down into time periods, there was a very slight trend for a higher ROI the further away the bet was placed from kick-off time. The graph here shows that analysis, although it was a very small trend in this particular dataset.
Face-to-face Sessions
If you have got through all of this (congratulations!) and still have any questions about the product, or who we are, or anything else on the main SharpBetting site, then please reach out to us. David does frequent face-to-face meetings online with new and possible members who naturally have questions about what we do. Some of the main questions were addressed in this video posted in early-May 2025 and we welcome any more questions from our members, whether already onboard or merely doing due-diligence before signing-up.
SharpBetting TV
We have a wide and growing portfolio of betting content on our SharpBetting TV channel and on YouTube (please subscribe!). You can search for topics, watch interviews with industry insiders and find some of our boxing deep-dives too. If there are any topics you would like us to address, reach out and we will put them on the list.
The Newsletter
Keep an eye on our Newsletter. We often ask for members' opinions on product development priorities, and provide details of odds-boosts and other noteworthy promotions.
Any other questions, contact me on X or drop us an email.
David Hipkin
co-founder, SharpBetting
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- For SharpBetting football, click here.
- For Sharpbetting boxing, click here.
- For SharpBetting racing, click here.
- For SharpBetting school, click here.
