A warm welcome. Here's our

BEGINNER'S GUIDE to SoccerLotto

1. THE MESSAGE BOARD

We cannot believe the calibre of the guys we have attracted to the Message Board. You will find extremely well-informed opinions there on  football and horse racing in particular, not to mention rugby, plus golf and American sports. You can ask any betting question you like and you are likely to get a prompt, friendly, helpful answer. There is also the chance to win cash prizes.

Any subscriber can lurk and browse there, but to become a contributor (which you will need to do to enter the competitions), it's best you register. It is run by third party software though and that means it won't recognise the user id and password you use to log on to the site itself.

All you need do is click on “Forum” then on the “Login” button in the right hand corner. You are then invited to fill in your details (your ID and password are up to you), choose an avatar, etc. etc. Once that is completed and submitted, you will be on the Members list, and if you come on to the site from the computer used to register for the Message Board, you will be automatically logged in when you go on to the Board from any part of SoccerLotto.

If all you want to do is slag off other people, or certain football clubs or their fans, then I'm sure other Message Boards will welcome you. Regular contributors are welcome to promote their own websites, but we don't like spam. Does anyone? Libel, racism or anything illegal? Forget it.

2. OUR STATS

The only disappointing thing we find about our Message Board is that occasionally we find people asking stat questions there to which the answer can be found on the site itself. The Message Board is such a magnet that they seem to forget about the 500,000+ pages of info around it. Our Keys (top left of many pages) are pretty helpful in this respect too!

To get the most out of the site, we suggest you spend an hour or so clicking all the links on the home page to see where they lead. The main pages deliver fixtures and form for a wide variety of leagues - which we hope to keep expanding. If you click on the team names within these guides, you are taken to the team records. If you click on the Info link to the far right, you can see the fixture histories. And if you click on the Division names, you access all the league tables we run for that section. All these three areas plus the fixture lists themselves contain unique data that you will not find anywhere else.

If you click on the UK League tables link, you will find that you can open up any year since the 87/88 season. You can then open up all the tables of one type together or all the table relating to one Division. If you open up a league table you will find you can order it according to different criteria. The Av. Opp feature of our League Tables is our favourite. After 12 years, it remains unique - you find it anywhere else in the the media. You can see at a glance what the average strength of opponents faced so far by every team is. It is an invaluable punting tool, especially in the first half of the season.

One you open up a Team Record, if you click on League Performance you can find out how any team has done so far against sides from different parts of the current league table - and not just the bottom or top half. This is another invaluable punting aide.

Our Analysis section offers further guidance on the best use of these stats for punting purposes and if there is any kind of search you would like us to do, you can ask on the Message Board.

We do not pretend to be a Football results or news site, except to a small extent in the summer when we are a fairly early source of Australian football results. During winter weekends, the updates throughout the site are only completed very soon after the whole weekend program is complete.

Lotto? You should find that side of the site self-explanatory. Come on to the Lotto  Forum in the Message Board if you don't. Or email us - perman@soccerlotto.com for any questions about editorials or site content, betting systems, tips etc, or admin@soccerlotto.com for anything remotely technical.

3. OUR AIM

Simple. To help you win. In general, we want to give value for money and to entertain by being interesting and informative with unique features unavailable elsewhere.

Where else can you find 450 interactive Lotto, Euomillions or Thunderball plans, all with guarantees, or league tables indicating the strength of opposition played to date or fixture histories and team records listing the league positions and form of teams when games were played? Er...nowhere.

We want to help people to be realistic and responsible in the way they gamble and to wise up to the many traps and pitfalls.

Of the betting activities covered on Soccerlotto, Lotto and Football Pools are LONG ODDS gambling which no professional gambler will touch as part of his mainstream activity - only as a bit of fun on the side. So if you choose to do those, you should hope to win, but not expect to.

There are several full-time professional gamblers amongst our membersip, two of whom have been with us for over twelve years. We are incredibly lucky that these guys share their insights with us. Others are clear specialists who make a profit year after year and we are priviledged to have them on the Forum as well.

If you want to become like them, the best advice must be that you should SPECIALISE and try to become as knowledgeable as those laying the odds in that area - even more knowledgeable than them if possible.

The SITE TIPS are given by someone who has won EIGHT pro. Competitions for tipping.  Ways to use the advice and the thinking behind them can be found in our Beginner's Guide to Individual Odds Betting and on the Forum.

Remember that if you like the site and wish to recommend it, you can make £20 from every person you introduce who signs up after their free three weeks, and you get £20 each time they re-subscribe, too.  If you click on My Account or Recruiting on the home page you'll find help and instructions. Once you get the hang of it, it's incredibly simple to do. 

It remains to wish you good luck and remind you that if you have any general queries about the site and its contents you should email perman@soccerlotto.com while if you have any technical problems or problems with your subscription, the place to go is admin@soccerlotto.com.

Once again...