Laying the Draw and Trading Out after the First Goal (If there is one 😱)

In this post I will be looking in depth into a popular football bet/trade “lay the draw” This bet/trade is only available to exchange users as you are betting that the match does not end in a draw. Laying or betting against an outcome of a football match, horse race or any other sporting and political event puts many punters off as the liability can be quite substantial because in effect you are acting as bookmaker to a “bet placer” for instance a losing lay bet of 6.0 at £10.00 would cost you £50.00 to the winner of the bet. Laying the draw can be somewhat safer as there is usually a winner in a football match and usually at least one team scores. If we look at a “Crowd Allowed” season of results ie a non-chinese bat flu season, 18/19 for instance there were less than 6% of games that ended 0-0 in the premier league, that is just 22 games out of 380. This of course doesn’t include score draws but all I am interested in is the games where at least one goal was scored.
If we look at the score draws for the same season (18/19) there were 32 1-1 draws 15 2-2’s, and 2 3-3’s making a total of 71 score and no-score draws.
The odds on a match draw behave with unerring predictability. From when the match kicks off the odds of a draw steadily decrease down to 1.01 at ful time unless a goal is scored whereby the odds jump with varying degrees depending on which team score. If the favourite scores first and early in the game then the draw odds will jump significantly allowing a profitable trade to be reaped. If however the “underdog” scored first and were the away side then the draw odds would not move much if at all.
To illustrate this, and with the kind permission of the support staff at Betangel, the following screen shots utilise the “soccer mystic” feature of their software.
I am using the match between PSG and Lille tonight where PSG are odds on favourites to win at 1.41 at the time of writing.

Soccer Mystic quite accurately predicts the odds of football matches when goals are scored and in the screenshot above you can see that if Lille were to score first in the first 15 minutes then the draw odds would actually go DOWN instead of up as in the case of PSG scoring first. This tells us that if this were the case then the market would believe that a draw was even more likely to happen than if there were no goals scored. Trading out after the first goal then would, in this case, be extremely detrimental to the health of our betfair account balance. These odds however would slowly decrease still until perhaps 2/3 of the game and only then would they start to increase slowly during the match so long as PSG didn’t score. How likely is that???
This is illustrated by the graph shown below (another great feature of soccer mystic)

It would actually take about 50 minutes of game time before the odds began to move favourably and 82 minutes before we could look at taking a profit. This is of course if PSG dont score a goal in the meantime.
This is a worst case scenario and the purpose of this post is to determine whether or not laying the draw is a viable strategy. “Blanket” laying all the 3’oclock Saturday premiership fixtures in any one week to a £10.00 stake would need an account balance in excess of £200.00 and that is just for the 5 games usually kicking off at this time.
How then can we reliably hope to make a profit from this strategy. The answer is research.
If we take tonight’s fixture between QPR and Nottingham Forest the odds of the draw are 3.6 to make a straight lay bet which will create a £26.00 liability for our £10.00 stake. (this means we would win £10.00 for a result other than a draw or if the game ended level we would lose £26.00)
If we remember that we are going to trade out our bet after the first goal we can look at the average times that these two teams scored their first goals. The following screenshot is from Soccerstats.com and shows the timings of goals both for and against when the teams were playing at home and away respectfully.

We can see that both teams score most of their goals in the second half but QPR do like to concede in the first half having 71% of goals scored against them this season happen in the first 45 minutes. Both teams have scored in all of their respective home and away games so we can tentatively look at what profit we can gain from laying this draw and trading out or “greening” once a first goal has been scored by either team. Betangel will be our guide for this again and the match is covered by soccer mystic. Using the predicted odds feature, if the first goal was scored by QPR then the odds would rise to about 5.1 to 5.2 up to the 60th minute which would give us a greened up profit of about £3.00 for our £10.00 stake. If Nottingham were to score first then our profit would levitate at about £1.60 in the same time frame. After 60 minutes, apart from the rusty starfish starting to clench due to the diminishing number of minutes left, our profit equalises if either team scores reaching a dizzying £8.97 profit in minute 90 – At this point you would cancel the trade instruction and take your tenner hoping against hope that the opposition didn’t score.
In this instance I will be testing a downloadable file from the betangel forum in practice mode which will automatically place a lay bet at kick off and trade out for an equal profit/loss, if and when the first goal is scored. I will post the resulting conclusion here after the match.
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