"I am not a number, I'm a free man," bellowed the Prisoner. Greedy sod, he should have been grateful, because Coventry City striker Paul Williams is remembered in the tomes of football folly by just a solitary letter. Yes, one blessed letter.

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EASY MONEY? YOU BET IT IS!
THURSDAY 14th AUGUST 2008
Football's great. Not only does it make us feel good and provide legitimate excuses so as not to have to spend time with the outlaws, but with a little bit of nous and a few pennies in the pocket, the sport can also engineer a very tidy second income... which invariably makes a small-ish dent in the colossal amounts of cash you waste on midweek away trips to Darlington.

Take the other week as an example. A certain betting company - who shall remain nameless so as to maintain Open Goal's precise and exacting non-bias standpoint to the beautiful game... a beacon of shining fairness in an otherwise dirty trough of deceit - were offering a stonking £25 free bet for new members who staked £10 on a game.

Now I know my ten-folds from my trifecta forecasts, and realise that commonly these 'welcome' bets often end in disappointment, but a 250% value gratis bet should never be passed up, so having promptly cleared up my tenner on Real Madrid to beat Hamburg, I set about shovelling my free £25 bet around this week.

Crawley to beat Lewes in the Conference nudged me closer to £50, while a Carling Cup sweep of Coventry, Forest and Sheffield United (against Aldershot, Morecambe and Port Vale respectively has got me over ten times my initial stake). Easy money, Rodders.

But the problem comes about when deciding when to stop. You see, if the season ended tomorrow and there were no other sporting events ever in the world again at all ever ever, my £100 would be nestling its way in my bank account by the weekend, and very welcome it would be too.

But sadly with every blessed day there are more football fixtures - and I mean, every day (who can't resist lumping some money on Wrexham tonight, par example?), and when there's not football, there can be racing, or F1, or cricket, or the Olympics, or those totally random roulette affairs where you genuinely are losing very real money to some bloke called Chino67 who lives in Shindabangdong.

Everyone is different and it really is different strokes for different folks (or should be stakes?), but I have learned from bitter personal experience that skill and the eye for a good bet is one thing; willpower is quite another.

 

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