Zzil said:
Is anyone doing MB without the help of PA? I'm wondering whether to sign up after the free trial or not.
Here's my experience because I was wondering the same.
I signed up to the free membership last Saturday - I only did the Coral offer, the BetFred one didn't appeal so early as it's a £30 FB (and looks like it has to be laid as a single bet) so that meant a fairly high lay bet would be required if I was to make much from it. As I was super paranoid about making a cockup, I decided to do the William Hill signup offer instead as it was also on Quidco and gives 2x£10 FB's.
As I didn't have membership to PA this was something I decided to do by myself and so also did all the odds matching manually etc. I also received a £10 freebet from BetFair when signing up to use their Exchange, and as I wanted to lay that off but obviously couldn't do that on Betfair Exchange. That led to me getting advice from from [member=143]auntygeek[/member] (thank you!) on this thread to also open a Smarkets account and a £10 Loss Refund there too.
So, Free PA advice = Coral, BetFred & BetFair Exchange
What I actually did - Coral, William Hill, Betfair with FB offer, Smarkets with Free Loss Offer. I already have been sent my first WH Reload since then too.
In other words, you can learn the basics from the PA free offer and take that knowledge forward to do other bets without them, particularly the easy Reloads.
That all said....
I paid for the Year subscription of PA yesterday, 6 days after starting with the free one (I personally run with the mantra - Do you think PA works - Y/N - If Yes, no point buying the monthly sub, go for yearly value straight out the door - If No, why are you subscribing at all...run away!)
My reasons for doing this, despite me quite successfully being able to do things manually.
I wanted to do Accumulators as I know there's good FB value there plus they make good Mug bets. I knew there was a lot of information behind the paywall that would help me learn how to get a grip on that with confidence). I think PA's video tutorials are excellent, and there are also some handy spreadsheets in there too.
While I have oodles of Sign Up offers to still do, it's handy to have them all listed and in a 'Tick Off' format, so it's nice and tidy and I don't have to worry that I've missed something.
While I have oodles of Sign Up offers to still do (x2) I know they won't last for ever, and getting 'Heads up' on Reloads that I could easily miss means that that alone would justify the PA membership in no time. An offer missed is money lost.
Now that I'm in there, there is lots of useful advice on how to make the best of the more specialised Reloads, such Horse comes 2nd Refunds and stuff like that. Very useful.
There is also lots of information on what to do if you make a mistake, because as long as you realise you've done it in time, it's still quite possible to retrieve the situation. Or at least make it not quite so bad.
You get full access to the OddsMatching tool, which is a nice time saver. You can actually subscribe to this outside of PA for I believe, £8 a month, so you have a black and white value associated with that. When this is taken into account, and if you buy the year membership plan, that means the rest of PA actually only costs £4.50 a month - which is imo, something of a bargain for all the tutorials, forums, offers and general handholding you get.
I only joined PA yesterday so I'm sure there's other things I'm missing too (I've not even really looked at their Casino and Bingo stuff yet).
I would say, if you are leery about joining PA, go ahead and work through all the obvious bookies and do their Sign Up offers and manually Match Bet. There are plenty of easy ones to work through without needing to pay PA for pointing them out and assuming you're starting with a low Bankroll like most people, it's not like you're going to be whizzing through them very quickly anyhow.
When you start to run out of the easy stuff though, I personally think it's worth paying for PA because it increases both your potential and efficiency.
Just my 2 newbie cents