Results for Wed 5 August 2026

5 picks. Four won, one lost. A good day, and the first one in a while, so I want to go through it properly rather than take a lap.

Keflavík did the heavy lifting. 3-0 against KA Akureyri, and that scoreline paid on both of the day’s selections. The –1.00 handicap needed a two-goal win and got three, so it settled in full at 2.09 profit — the biggest single return on the card and the only price above 2.00 all day. The Draw No Bet on the same match came in at 1.69.

Two bets on one match is the most this system will ever take, and it only happens when both lines qualify on their own merits rather than because I liked the look of the fixture. They did, and the match repaid both. It is worth being clear that this cuts the other way just as hard — a 0-0 there would have cost a full unit on one leg and a stake return on the other, and days where the double lands are the reason the cap exists at two rather than three.

The Keflavík –1.00 also makes a point about where these prices come from. The best bookmaker on the board had 2.88. The exchange had 3.09, seven per cent better, and that gap is most of the difference between a good day and an ordinary one. It moved a long way during the morning too — it was 2.66 early on almost no money, and 3.09 by the time there was a real book. Early prices on Icelandic football are not prices, they are placeholders.

Ranheim II won 4-1 and the Draw No Bet returned 1.67 — a price that was nine per cent clear of the next best available, which is a large enough gap that it was worth the time it took to find. Richmond beat New York Cosmos 2-0, so the +0.50 never needed the draw half of its cover.

The loss, and it is the one I flagged in advance. TPV lost 2-0 at OLS Oulu carrying +1.25, which is two half-stakes at +1.0 and +1.5. A two-goal defeat puts both halves down, so it is a full loss with no partial return.

What makes that one worth dwelling on is that I wrote a warning next to it when I published the card. That selection came from a cell with an exceptional record — 32 wins and one loss across two years — but one that had always been a short-price grinder, with a median winning price of 1.25 and nothing above 1.65 in its history. Yesterday it was priced at 1.90. I said at the time that the edge looked real but the comparison to its own record was not exact, and took it knowingly. It lost. That is not a vindication of the warning, and it is not a refutation of the bet either — one result cannot settle a question like that. But a bet trading well outside the range its record was built in deserves to be labelled as such, before the result rather than after.

1. Keflavík 3-0 KA Akureyri (Iceland Besta deild karla) — Home AH -1.00 Keflavík @ 3.09 — won
2. Keflavík 3-0 KA Akureyri (Iceland Besta deild karla) — Home AH 0.00 Keflavík @ 1.69 — won
3. OLS Oulu 2-0 TPV (Finland Ykkönen) — Away AH +1.25 TPV @ 1.90 — lost
4. Ranheim II 4-1 NTNUI (Norway Division 3 Group 2) — Home AH 0.00 Ranheim II @ 1.67 — won
5. Richmond Kickers 2-0 New York Cosmos (USA USL League One) — Home AH +0.50 Richmond @ 1.57 — won

Day close: +3.02u (4 won, 1 lost from 5).

On not over-reading this. On Monday I wrote that the recent run was poor, that the losses had mostly been bets that were live late and lost to margins we do not control, and that I was not changing anything. Two days later the card returns three units. It would be easy to present that as the turn arriving on schedule.

It is not, and the reasoning has to work in both directions or it is not reasoning. A five-bet day tells you almost nothing. If four losses in a week were mostly variance — and I argued that they were — then four winners in a day are mostly variance too. The honest position is that yesterday is consistent with the system working, exactly as the bad week was consistent with the system working, and neither one is evidence on its own. What actually settles it is a few hundred bets, not five.

What I will say is that the shape of the day was the shape this portfolio needs. One price above 3.00 returning more than two units is worth four winners at 1.40, and on a book of short-priced selections those larger prices are where the profit actually comes from. Finding 3.09 where the best bookmaker showed 2.88 is the part of this job that compounds.

Same rules today.