Category Archives: trading in-play

How I Turned £10 into Profit: A Betting Journey Through Wimbledon 2025

Putting my research into practice I set aside a £10.00 “Bank” and at the start of the tournament started laying the top 10 seeded players for a liability of £1.00.
These were in order of seeding:
1. Sabalenka
2. Gauff
3. Pegula
4. Paolini
5. Zheng
6. Keys
7. Andreeva
8. Swiatek
9. Badosa
10. Navarro

Round 1

The 1st round saw 4 of the top 10 seeds lose, namely Gauff, Pegula, Zheng, and Badosa.
Gauff, the No 2 Seed lost in straight sets to Yastremska and I laid her at 1.20 for a stake of £5.00.
Pegula, the No 3 seed, lost to Cocciaretto, again in straight sets, 6-2/6-3 and managed to lay her at odds of 1.13 for a stake of £7.69
Zheng, The No 5 seed, lost to Siniakova 7-5/4-6/6-1 Laying her at odds of 1.60 netting me £1.67
Badosa, the No 9 seed was the final casualty of the 1st round losing to Boulter 6-2/3-6/6-4. She was the biggest odds at 1.70 and with a stake of £1.43
The other 6 top 10 seeded players all made it through to the second round which meant that these 6 cost me a total of £6.00 in liability stakes but with the afore mentioned players falling I had a profit of £15.79 from these matches which gave me a £9.79 net profit from the 1st round matches.

Round 2

6 of the top 10 seeded players were now safely through to the second round and this posed a possible £6.00 loss if all 6 won their matches. Paolini, the No 4 seed, who I had laid at odds of 1.19 for a stake of £5.26 lost to unseeded Rakhimova 4-6/6-4/4-6. Losing £5.00 on the other 5 top 10 seeded players this shock exit of the No 4 seed netted me a small profit of 26p to add to my £9.79 profit from round 1.
Total net profit from the 1st 2 rounds now stood at £10.05 and only 5 of the top 10 players left in the tournament.

Round 3

The sixth casualty was Madison Keys, the No 6 seed lost to Siegemund in straight sets 6-3/6-3. Having laid keys at odds of 1.19 for a stake of £5.25 this netted me £1.25 for the round and a total profit for the tournament so far of £11.30 as the other 4 seeds made it safely through to round 4

Round 4

This round saw the match up of No 7 seed Andreeva and No 10 seed Navarro which meant that my total possible loss from round 4 would be reduced from a highest of £4.00 if all 4 won their matches to £2.00 if Sabalenka and Swiatek both won plus, either a net profit if Navarro (Odds 2.60) won, or a net loss if Andreeva (Odds 1.62) won. In the event Both Sabalenka and Swiatek did indeed win their matches and Andreeva dismissed Navarro in straight sets 6-2/6-3 this gave me a net loss of 37p on this match plus £2.00 loss on the other 2 players making the 4th round my first loss of the tournament of £2.37 making this a total tournament profit so far of £8.93. This also left 3 players in the Quarter Finals and a potential loss in that round of £3.00

Quarter Finals.

The quarter finals saw Sabalenka safely through to the semi finals as did Swiatek giving a loss of £2.00 but Andreeva lost to Bencic which won me £2.05 after laying Andreeva at odds of 1.49. This gave me a round profit of 5p and even though small is still a profit and my tournament total going into the Semi Finals stood at a healthy £8.98

Semi Finals

Sabalenka played Anisimova and at last the No 1 seed fell! Laying her at odds of 1.4 for a stake of £2.50 this gave me a round profit of £1.50 to add to my total as Swiatek dismissed Bencic in straight sets 6-2/6-0
Total profit going into the final now stood at £10.48.

The Final

The odds for Swiatek to win the final were 1.42 which I laid for a stake of £2.38 this meant that if she did win my Tournament profit would be £9.48 or if Anisimova won my profit for the tournament would finish up at £12.86.
Swiatek demolished Anisimova 6-0/6-0 to become the first Polish lady to win the Ladies Title and reduce my profit for the tournament to £9.48.

Summary

I made the rules at the beginning of the tournament and kept my liability to £1.00 per player and not by market which would have made things complicated in “Match-Up” matches. The chart above shows P/L in £ of each player. It is not actually necessary to have an exchange account as a similar result can be obtained by backing the opponents of the seeded players for your desired stake. As a quick comparison in the Match between Coco Gauff and Yastremska in the 1st round. I laid Gauff at odds of 1.2 giving me a profit of £5.00 but the best odds available to back Yastremska at the bookies was 4/1 (5.0), if you had backed her at these odds your profit would have been £4.00 instead of £5.00

Had I have lost my £10.00 bank halfway through the tournament then I would have stopped and that would have been that, but having researched this, the trends suggested that the Ladies tournament provided the better chance of profit than the Gentleman’s tournament using this strategy. I am sure that many of you reading this will scoff at the stakes involved saying is it worth it. I don’t really care what you think! this was a practical exercise where I had an idea and put it to the test with a bank that I was prepared to lose. I have now increased that bank by nearly as much again of which I will utilise by increasing the liability to £1.20 for the WTA 250 Hamburg Ladies Open and laying the top 8 seeded players

Disclaimer

If you liked this content please “like” so I can get some feel for the effort I am putting into this being beneficial to others who are looking to make a couple of quid but no fortunes.

Please gamble responsibly and don’t bet more than you can afford. The content of this post is historical fact and in no way guarantees the out come of future tournaments.

Betting Trends at Wimbledon: Analyzing Top Seed Losses

Before the year 2000 you would have to go back to 1962 to find a player out of the top 5 seeding in the ladies tournament that won. Since and including 2000 there have only been 10 players that were within the top 5 seeding that have won the ladies tournament. Where did these players fall by the wayside and what odds on the exchange could you lay them off at?
2024 saw 31 seed Krejcikova winning the tournament with a 2-1 victory over 7 seed Paolini, but the top 10 seeds started falling out in the 1st round with the dismissal of Zheng and Vondrousova with sportsbook odds of 1.17 and 1.13 respectively. Round 2 saw 5 seed Pegula lose to unseeded Wang, her sportsbook odds were 1.25. The third round was a disaster for the seeded players with 1 seed Swiatek (Odds 1.08), 9 seed Sakkari (Odds 2.2) , and 10 seed Jabeur (Odds 1.5) all crashing out. This left just 4 of the top 10 seeded players progressing into the 4th round which also saw casualties in the form of 2 seed Gauff (Odds 1.29) and 11 seed Collins (Odds 1.44). (I have included Collins at 11 seed because No 3 seed Sabalenka withdrew before round 1 and did not play in the tournament). Both remaining top 10 seeded players, seed 4 Rybakina and seed 7 Paolini made it safely through the quarter finals but the semi finals were the limit for seed 4 Rybakini (Odds 1.2) who lost to eventual winner Krejcikova. As mentioned before Paolini was the last of the top 10 seeds to fall and became tournament runner up with match odds of 2.2.

The implications of these events warrant some serious investigation into either backing the underdog at sportsbook odds if you haven’t got an exchange account or laying the seeded player on the exchanges.

2024 Round 1 Matches

Wimbledon 1st round matches backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

The table above shows the results and profit had you backed the underdog with Bet365 sportsbook for a £1.00 level stake. As you can see your profit would have been £1.00

Wimbledon 1st round matches laying the top 10 seeded players.

This second table shows the results and profit achieved when laying the top 10 seeded players for a £1.00 liability at the exchange with a 0% commission If you factor in a 2% commission then the profit would be £3.02 instead of £3.25.

2024 2nd Round Matches

Wimbledon 2nd Round Backing the Underdog at £1.00 Level Stakes

In the 2nd round just 1 seeded player was knocked out and the “underdog” for the match was Wang Xin who was 3/1. Total stakes for round 2 was £8.00 producing, after Wangs’ win, a total loss of £4.00. This brings our total P/L for the tournament if we were backing the opponent of the top 10 seeded players to -£3.00.

Wimbledon 2nd round matches laying the remaining top 10 seeded players for a £1.00 liability

This table above shows the results if we had laid the remaining top 10 seed players. Our loss after 2% commission would be £3.74 giving a total loss of £3.72

2024 3rd Round Matches.

Wimbledon 3rd round matches Backing the underdog for a £1.00 level Stake

2024s’ 3rd round saw 3 of the top ten seeded players get knocked out including No 1 seed Swiatek which produced the highest individual profit of £7.00. The overall profit for round 3 backing the underdogs at Bet365 was £5.30 giving us an overall tournament profit of £2.30.

Wimbledon 3rd round matches laying the remaining top 10 seeded players to £1.00 liability

The dismissal of 3 of the remaining 7 top 10 seeded players has put our P/L back into the black with a 3rd round profit of £5.71 before commission deduction. With this factored in the 3rd round profit is £5.51 giving a tournament profit of £1.79

2024 4th Round Matches

Wimbledon 4th round matches backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

The dismissal of both Gauff and Collins in round 4 would have given us a level stake profit of £2.50 backing the underdog at Bet365 the retirement of both Keys and Kalinskaya ensured safe passage to the Quarter Finals of the remaining 2 top ten seeds Paolini and Rybakina. With these two wins in this round our total tournament profit for backing the underdog now stands at £4.80.

Wimbledon 4th round matches laying the remaining 4 top 10 seeds to a liability of £1.00.

Laying players at such short odds at the exchange has paid off in this round giving us an after commission profit of £3.10 adding to our tournament profit giving a total of £4.89

2024 Quarter Finals

Both of the remaining top 10 seeded players made it safely through to the semi finals reducing our Level stake profit when backing the underdog to £2.80. Laying the seeded players also had the same effect on our laying to a liability profit to £2.89 after commission.

2024 Semi Finals

Wimbledon 2024 Semi Final Matches showing the backing of the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

Paolini triumphed in her semi final match against unseeded Vekic but backing Krejcikova to win against Rybakina paid dividends producing an overall semi final profit to £1.00 level stakes at Bet365 of £2.0 giving us an overall tournament profit with just the final to play of £5.30.

Semi final matches involving the remaining 2 top ten seeded players when laying to a £1.00 liability.

Again laying the seeded player instead of backing the underdog produced a greater profit before 25 commission was deducted even with the commission subtracted the profit is £3.28 giving a total tournament profit with just the final to play of £6.17

2024 The Final.

The Final for Wimbledon 2024 where 31 seed Krejcikova beat 7th Seed Paolini 3/6 6/3 6/4

Backing the “Underdog” in the final at Bet365 produced a profit of 73p which when added to our tournament total for backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes has given us a tournament grand total of £6.03

Laying the seeded player paid off again giving a small profit after commission of 78p

Laying the no 7 seed Paolini at odds of 2.25 has seemed the only sensible bet in the tournament given the odds of the eventual winner, Krejcikova, of 1.8 at the exchange. A profit of 78p was achieved after the reduction of 2% commission and when added to the tournament total for laying each and every one of the top ten seeded players produced an overall profit of £6.95. This is 92p more than backing the underdog at a sportsbook.

Analysis of the tournament.

Without doubt had we laid the top ten seeded players then our profit would have been more than backing the underdog at the bookmaker. However there is the fact that bookmakers need to create at least a 7% overound and we may well have benefited more by backing the underdog at an exchange especially if you have a promotional 0% commission. Without the top seeds falling by the wayside early on in the tournament the profit would have been less or even a loss might have occurred, certainly our profit was boosted by the single fact that Swiatek crashed out in the 3rd round!
Overall a success and in fact a low risk strategy. Laying to a liability of just £1.00 means that we can monitor and control any losses. We can make the lay bets in the knowledge that if we start with a small bank of just £10 and not let any emotion enter into our decisions we can keep this strategy fun.

How the seeded players faired in previous years.

2023

Top 10 Seeds

Swiatek – Lost in Round 4 (Odds 1.19)
Sabalenka – Lost in Semi Finals (Odds 1.7)
Rybakina – Lost in Quarter Finals (Odds 1.71)
Pegula – Lost in Quarter Finals (Odds 1.76)
Garcia – Lost in Round 3 (Odds 2.05)
Jabeur – Lost in The Final (Odds 1.5)
Gauff – Lost in round 1 (Odds 1.34)
Sakkari – Lost in round 1 (Odds 1.36)
Kvitova -Lost in Round 4 (Odds 1.8)
Krejcikova Lost in Round 2 (Odds 1.35)

Swiatek
Reached the 4th round where she lost to Svitolina After losing 3 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £5.26 giving a profit of £2.54
Sabalenka
Reached the Semifinals where she lost to Jabeur. After losing 5 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.43 giving a loss of £3.57
Rybakina
Reached the quarter finals were she lost to Jabeur. After 4 losing lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.41 giving a loss of £2.59
Pegula
Reached the Quarter finals where she lost to Vondrousova. After losing 4 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.32 giving a loss of £2.68
Garcia
Reached the 3rd round where she lost to Bouzkova. After losing 2 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won 96p giving a loss of £1.04
Jabeur
Reached the final where she lost to Vondrousova. After losing 6 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £2.00 giving a loss of £4.00
Gauff
Lost in the 1st round to Kenin. We would have won £2.94.
Sakkari
Lost in the 1st round to Kostyuk. We would have won £2.78
Kvitova
Reached the 4th Round where she lost to Jabeur. After losing 3 lay bets of £1.00 each we would have won £1.25 giving a loss of 1.75
Krejcikova
Reached the 2nd round where she lost to Andreeva. After just 1 losing lay bet of £1.00 we would have won £2.86 giving a profit of £1.86

Conclusion.


We would have lost £5.51 over the whole tournament this year if we had laid each of the top 10 seeds to the end.

2022

Top 10 seeds

Swiatek – Lost in Round 3 (Odds 1.2) – P/L £3.00
Kontaveit – Lost in Round 2 (Odds 1.50) – P/L £1.00
Jabeur – Reached the Final (Odds 1.83) – P/L -£4.80
Badosa – Reached the 4th Round (Odds 3.4) – P/L -£2.58
Sakkari – Reached the 3rd Round (Odds 1.20) – P/L £3.00
Pliskova – Reached the 2nd round (Odds 1.71) – P/L £0.41
Collins – Lost in the 1st Round (Odds 1.79) – P/L £1.27
Pegula – Reached the 3rd Round (Odds 1.57) – P/L -£0.25
Mugurusa – Lost in the 1st round (Odds 1.25) – P/L £4.00
Raducanu Reached the 2nd Round (Odds 1.70) – P/L £0.43

Conclusion

We would have Won £5.48 over the whole tournament this year if we had laid each of the top 10 seeds to the end.

Betting Insights: Analyzing Provisional Odds for Winners

Yesterday I showed you how to create a basic query in TSMs’ Selection Hunter to find some likely winners using the back test mode to discover any trends and it came up with the following 3 horses
The selections are
13:50 Stage Star
14:25 Copperhead
15:00 Sunray Shadow.

If you missed it you can read the post here




13:50 Stage Star
Stage Star met the provisional odds criteria of between 2.00 and 2.99 but went off at a BSP of 3.21. Our conditions of placing a bet with betangel were that the BSP had to be between 2.00 and 2.99 for the software to trigger. 3.21 was out of our range at 3.21 so no bet was made.

Stage Star only managed 4th out of 5

14:25 Copperhead
Joe Tizzards’ Copperhead also qualified as the provisional odds were posted as 2.85 but again the BSP was outside of the criteria and went off at 3.5 giving us another miss fire from Betangel.
Copperhead Won by 14 lengths!!!

15:00 Sunray Shadow
The final selection was the Skelton trained and ridden Sunray Shadow who’s Provisional odds were posted at 2.5. Winning by a length and a 1/4 the BSP was well within the range at 2.23 and Betangel Fired the bet in 10 seconds before post time catching 2.25

Summary
2 of the 3 selections went off at odds outside the criteria one of them winning but alas one losing
2 of the 3 went off as favourites despite all 3 being ranked as provisional favourite.
Betangel fired just one bet and this returned 125% ROI
Given the strike rate of the criteria when back tested (68%) 2 actual winners from our query seemed to tentatively back this trend.

Cautionary note
While this was a completely genuine test run you should not go out and back every Aintree runner with a BSP of between 2.0 and 2.99 even though I back tested over a period of nearly 2 years results you should always do as much research as you can and start with stakes that you can afford to lose.

Build your bank steadily Racing is not going to finish tommorrow!!!

The staking Machine software has limited use for free but If you want to take advantage of the Selection Hunter you will need to pay – It only costs £24 for 1 year – Twenty Four!! this is not a typo and can be paid via paypal
That’s only 2 quid a month and if you had backed Sunray Shadow for a quid you would have made over 1/2 a months subscription already.

Discovering Profitable Staking Plans for Premiership Teams

There are many “get rich quick” schemes flying around and to many staking plans are typical of these and to others the holy grail of betting. In this feature I am going to look at and back test just some of the miriad of plans that are available, some you may have heard of and some you most definitely haven’t.
As with any thing that is potentially damaging to your bank balance rigorous testing should be undertaken before risking your money with the bookies. In this series of posts I will be using the “Staking Machine” website software to analyse the results from a set study of Premiership teams taken from last seasons finishing positions of top (Man City) 5th Place (Tottenham) and 10th Place (Crystal Palace)

What are staking plans? Essentially staking plans are a tool where you can use a pre determined equation to set your stake for the next bet in a sequence that you have chosen beforehand you would like to bet on. This could be following a racing tipster in your favourite newspaper to betting on a set trap number in greyhound racing. This post will focus on football and backing your favourite team through the season.

So which staking plan would you choose? The list is quite extensive and I will be analysing all of the plans that are on the staking machines website but to name just a few there is level, percentage, 1326, Fibonacci, Parley and the list goes on.
There are some basic things that you would need to input into the software for some of the plans and one of them is that it needs the average winning odds. This means the average of the odds where the selection won.
There is a section on the main software screen that shows strike rates, average winning odds average odds losing sequences and winning sequences a snap shot of which is shown below.

This is the quick stats snapshot from the data |I have entered for Crystal Palaces’ 23/24 season. Click to view a larger version in a new tab.


With last years football results this is easy as all the data can be downloaded from http://www.football-data.co.uk, which provides downloadable raw data from most leagues from around the world but in so much detail as regards to the domestic leagues you need to slim the excel sheets down a bit. What I will be using is the spreadsheet available below and filtering out the home and away results of the teams mentioned above to glean the average winning odds.

Premiership 23-24 staking plan study worksheetDownload
Man City’s Home odds when they won at home

The screenshot above shows Man City’s home wins and the average home win odds provided by http://www.football-data.co.uk
The screenshot below shows the matches where Man City were playing away from home and the average odds for an away win.

Man City’s away odds when they won when playing away

As you can see I have used the power of excel to determine the average of the average home win odds when they won and the average of the away odds when they won away from home and these are – Average winning Home odds 1.21 and the average winning away odds are 1.39 giving an over all average winning odds last season of 1.21 + 1.39 = 2.6
2.6/ 2 = 1.30

We can now enter this figure into the staking machine software. The rule for this is that you take the decimal odds of the average win odds and subtract 1 so the figure we enter into the winning odds box is 0.3

You can click the image above to open it in a new tab to make things clearer. Once this has been saved we can start entering the data from the spreadsheet. It should be noted at this point that the bank box is pre populated with £100 – you don’t physically need a £100 bank this is virtual all you need in your bookmaker account is the funds to make the next bet which is usually 1% of this i.e. £1.00. The demo mode of the software only allows you to input 10 results but I have subscribed so I can show you the full seasons bets.

Manchester city won 28 of their 38 league games last season (23/24) and subsequently finished league champions and everything that goes with this title but how did the devoted fan, who backs his team to win for £2.00 per week, fair? – Not too well to be honest. He would have lost £3.96 over the season. How can this be?

This graph shows the cumulative total using level stakes backing Manchester City to win throughout the season to a £1.00 level stake.


For a staking plan to work you need winners we all agree on that, but if the winners are at such a short price as Man City’s were then you need more winners. You may recall that the average “Winning Odds” for Man City last season was 1.3 this means that you would need a 76.8% strike rate to call a profit. Man City’s actual strike rate for last season was 73.7%. So Man City won the league and the bookies won the money- again!!!
This is just one instance where the advocates of level stake betting won’t turn a profit even though the strike rate is over 70%. There are however staking plans that will net you a profit but they are not life changing. I will explore these in more detail as time goes on but for now I will outline what would have happened if you had backed Tottenham throughout the season to win.
So again we first determine the winning odds for Tottenham by finding the average home winning odds and adding them to the away winning odds and dividing by 2. We can easily do this by filtering the data in excel as we did for Man City.

The average home winning odds are 1.79

Tottenham won 13 of their home games producing an average of 1.79 winning odds.

When playing away their strike rate was very much reduced and their winning odds averaged 1.83
If we add these together and divide by 2 we get : 1.79 +1.83 = 3.62 / 2 = 1.81

Plagued by bad luck or just better teams Tottenham achieved a winning strike rate of just 52.6% where in weeks 11 – 15 saw their longest losing streak. Average winning odds of 1.8 require a winning strike rate of 55.5%. So Again the bookies win and the fans wonder why when their team did so well in coming 5th in the table have, to a level stake of £2.00 on each game £5.00 less than when they started.

This graph shows the frequency of the odds grouped into values and how many matches they won at those ranged odds.

As you can see from the graph above when the odds were below 1.5 (7 in total) Tottenham won all of their games – as the odds suggest that they should have. the plan all starts to go pear shaped when the odds rise above 2.0 and more research might reveal that not backing Tottenham at these odds could improve the profit figure. The table below shows the ranges of odds and the profit/loss and a return on investment (ROI) had you just backed tottenham within these ranges. It should be noted that these figures are to a £1.00 level stake not £2.00

Click on the image to open in a new tab for a clearer look.

Finally on this post the results from 10th placed Crystal Palace. Crystal Palace had a total of 13 wins out of their 38 league matches giving a strike rate of 34.2%. Their average winning odds for these 13 games was 3.36 which required a strike rate of just 29.7% for all games over the season. This team would have made their fans a profit of £8.39 over the season if they had backed them to win with a level stake profit of £2.00

The following graphs and tables show in more detail the figures quoted above for Crystal Palace and the 23/24 season

Backing matches at “Bread and Butter” odds (1.5 – 3.0) would have shown a profit and 2 wins, one at odds between 5.5 and 6.0 and another at odds of above 10.0 and this can be better seen in the table below Again these figures show profit/loss to a £1.00 level stake.

Click to veiw in a new tab.


These are back tested results and show what would have happened if you had backed your team to level stakes and while not entirely picked at random for this study it does show that care needs to be taken when blindly backing at level stakes. Manchester city might have won nearly 3/4 of there league games but it was not enough to turn a profit
In the posts that follow I will be analysing the same 3 teams using a variety of staking plans to determine if there was a greater profit or a reduced loss to be made and still keep the betting enjoyable.

There is one more point I would like to make on the subject of strike rates and winning odds averages. The bookies know that if they are offering odds that are below the average winning odds then they are going to win. If you know about odds movement when a match is in play then you will realise that there are many times that you can back a team in play when the win odds of the team will rise above the average winning odds giving you the edge instead of them – There is of course the distinct possiblity that they may score early in the game!! These are all things that have to be considered and a risk assessment taken. Don’t be in such a hurry to lose your money!

The staking plans I will be using will be taken in the order listed on the staking machines software and after Level stakes the next plan is called “Percentage”. Below is a list of all the staking plans used which, when I have written the post will have a link attached so you can easily go straight to the post. Some of the plans I have never heard of and further reading on his site reveals that he himself has invented them.

Percentage
Fibonacci
Dalembert
Parlay
Pro
Secure
Fixed
Kelly
Square Root
Labouchere
Retirement
Bookies Bank
Bookies Bank v2
XYZ
Up X Down Y
LP 28
Recovery
Recovery Type 2
Recovery Type 3
SAW
Rolling Doubles
Coup Master
1 Point
i-TSM Plan

Greyhounds Backing The Favourite Day 1 (2nd March 2024)

For a while now I have been pondering the possibility of backing the favourite at the dogs to see if there is any money to be made. Even though the rumours that greyhound racing is not the most virtuous sport you can make a wager on it is certainly the most abundant sport with over 140 races each day and that is just the UK. According to the Oxford Stadium website 35% of all favourites win! This however is across all tracks, distances and, classes of race. To this end I decided that the only true way of sorting the wheat from the chaff is to back every single favourite in every single race and use the power of excel to weed out losing statistics from the more profitable. So without ado I will post day by day findings on this blog

My criteria is simple I will back each race favourite 20 seconds before the post time to a liability of just £1.00 so in effect my average stake should be kept to about 30p per race. This means that should the favourite win then the Profit will be £1.00 and if loses the stake determined by the odds that are available at that moment in time on the betfair exchange. There have been instances where the odds of two of the dogs have been exactly the same at the 20 second point and no bet was struck. This is unfortunate but one of those things. After testing that the software worked as required on March 1st testing began in earnest on March 2nd and showed an overall profit of £13.41 with profits showing from all meetings except Crayford and Hove.

Click to Enlarge

Starting with Central Park, there were a total of 6 winning favourites giving a small profit of £2.66 The rest I will put into a table for easy reference.

TrackWinning FavsAvg StakeP/L
Crayford145p-£3.85
Doncaster9 (2 Meetings)69p£4.73
Hove6£1.43 **-£0.51
Monmore10 (2 Meetings)57p£2.44
Newcastle648p£1.69
Oxford8 (2 Meetings63p£1.26
Perry Barr847p£1.48
Romford10 (2 Meetings)53p£3.03
Swindon449p£0.48
** Quite a few Odds On Favs Lost!!!

Crayford was quite obviously not a track to back the favourite on this day as just one favourite won, Hove had a few odds on favourites running hence the average stake of £1.43 with the shortest priced favourite of the day losing costing a massive £3.12 All in all not a bad day for the first day.
There were a total of 160 races of which 64 favourites won giving a 40% win rate.

Lets go on to look at the best performing meeting of the day which was Doncaster. Producing an overall profit of £4.73 with 9 winning favourites at the 2 meetings.
Of the 8 winning favourites 4 were in OR class races or Open Class and scored a 100% strike rate as did the OR3 class which accounted for 2 more winning favs.
The sheer volume of information I have collected just over the last 20 days is by no means enough and in subsequent posts I will delve a little deeper into which tracks are more profitable than others using this system and which Races should be avoided on all counts after looking at the stats.

Just as a Taster the best performing track using this system between 2 March and 22 march is Nottingham with a profit of £15.89
The worst Track for winning Favourites is Sunderland with a loss of £22.03

My total profit for this period backing every race is £38.28

Betfair Historical Data – Easy When You Know How

Betfair Historical Data has been, for some time now, openly available for free but it seems that no one is prepared to share just how you open the damned stuff!!!
There are plenty of sites out there willing to share their python knowledge but stop short of a full explanation – very frustrating.
At this point I have to give credit to “Trading The Market” guys who have finally given me the Eureka Moment!
If you follow the steps below you will soon have all the research information to back test your systems.
To begin with you do need to have a betfair account and to access which data you need you will need to be logged in and at the following page
https://historicdata.betfair.com/#/home

For the purposes of this post I will be using the basic plan which costs nothing and has a data frequency of 1 minute. If you need more frequent data logs then you will have to purchase your data by the month but there are free plans available for limited months mainly in 2020.
In this post I will be analysing the data from the North London Derby – Arsenal v Tottenham on the 1st October 2022
The easy way to handle this data is to “purchase” a month at a time so I will “Buy” the Soccer data from OCT 2022
To do this simply select the plan, sport, and month you need in the drop down boxes and click “Add to Purchases” and then the “purchase” as in the screen shot below

You will then be asked to confirm your purchase – Check that you haven’t included the wrong plan by mistake as the fee will be taken straight from your betfair balance. If everything is ok click confirm and you will see the following screen.

As you can see from the screen shot there are over 250000 markets! for our research we only need 3 or 4 of these so we need to find them.
I want to know how the under/over Markets behaved when each goal went in during the match. To do this click on the “My Data” Tab as shown below and you will see your most recent purchases as well as plans you have bought before.

We now need to populate the down load fields with the information that we need so if we look at the match stats we can see that there were 4 goals scored in total.

I want to see the following market odds
O/U 1.5
O/U 2.5
O/U 3.5
O/U 4.5
O/U 5.5
O/U 6.5
and the Match.
To do this we need to populate the download files panel as follows:

In the Plan Box (which is at the top but hidden in this screen shot) enter Basic
In the Sport Box enter Soccer
In the From and Upto Boxes enter 1 Oct 2022
Leave the event ID Blank
In the Event Name box enter Arsenal
In the Market Type box select the markets you need and in this case its Match_Odds
Over_Under_25
Over_Under_35
Over_Under_45
Over_Under_55
Over_Under_65
In the Country Box select GB (There is no UK)
and in the File Type Box select M
Click the Add to Downloads button
You now should have 12 files ready to down load.
Click the Yellow Download button

You will find this file in your downloads folder as a Data “tar” file

Double click the file to un pack it in your unzipping program

Keep double clicking until you get to the actual data files

You should now see your 6 “bz2” files
To make them easy to find Create a new folder on your desktop and name it ARS v TOT

You can now drag and drop the files into this folder from your unpacking software

We now need to convert these files into a readable format and Betfair provide one such program easily available from their website.

You will find this here

https://www.betfairhistoricdata.co.uk/

The first file we want to see is the Match Odds and this will usually be the largest file as most volume would have passed through that market. In this case we are looking at File 1.203213491

These are not very user friendly file names so I am going to rename them. to do this we simply select a file from the list using the betfair Historical Data Processor as below and note the file number and which market it contains. In this case File 1.203213498 is the O/U 6.5 goals Market. We dont want to do anything else yet. We are just identifying the files for our convenience

We can then repeat the process with all the files noting the file numbers to the markets and then rename all the files as below

We are now going to convert these files into meaningful excel ranges where we can look at them in more detail. To do this we again select a file from the folder using the Historical Data Processor and click the download settings button as shown in the screenshot below

This will open the settings dialog box as shown below

We now need to populate our spreadsheet with any relevant information we will need by clicking the drop down box arrow and selecting the fields by ticking the relevant tick boxes (dont worry if you put too much info into the spreadsheet as we can delete it later)

Once you have selected what you need close the drop down box by clicking the “up” arrow and because we are just interested in the in play data slide the “preplay” button to off as shown below and click save

We are now ready to download the file as a CSV file into Excel we do this by simply clicking the “Download CSV” button as shown and let the wonders of better brains than our own do its stuff.

This will put a zipped file into your downloads folder with the original file number

If we double click this file it will unpack and be available as a csv file which we can open with excel.

It may be a good idea to move this file to a new folder on your desktop and rename it as I have done here

If we open this in excel this is what we get.

We can now start to manipulate the data to best suit our needs. We can start by removing some of the columns we dont need. I have removed the following columns to be left with the following spreadsheet.
Market ID
Selection ID

The next task is to make the published time more reader friendly. as you can see this is total jibberish, it means nothing. If you select cell A2, in the address window you will see that the full date and time is shown

So that column A shows the time in hrs and minutes we need to select hh:mm from the custom cell formats as shown below.

When we click ok then cell A2 will show the actual time of the published data for that row

To convert all the row simply select Column A and repeat

When you click ok your spreadsheet should look like this

you will notice that the times are repeated 3 times this is because there are 3 separate outcomes within this betfair market – Arsenal to win The Draw and Tottenham to win.
If we now draw our attention to Column F this is the last traded price column and we could do with tidying up this so that all the figures are shown to 2 decimal places. To do this simply select Column F and using the cell number format dropdown box, select “Number” as shown below.

Your spreadsheet should now look something like this

A bit more tidying up by changing the column headers and this is what you should be looking at.

This is your basic data spreadsheet for the entire match for the Match Odds Market You can now save it into a folder and repeat the process with the other 5 markets

In my next post I will show you how to manipulate the data so that we can see what happened in each market as each goal went in

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Tennis Trading No 5 Dutching the Set Betting Market

With Wimbledon just around the corner I thought it might be interesting to explore the possibility of dutching the set betting market for the WTA as there is only 4 possible outcomes and using betangel’s dutching tool I can place orders into the market to ensure a 20% or better return on a £10 total stake.
The french Open is currently at the 4th round stage in the WTA competition and there are just 4 matches today (Sunday 4th June 2023)
The risk to reward on this is quite high depending on the odds offered. anything from a 50% risk up to a mighty 80% risk.
In this exercise I will be placing the margin stake onto the favourites 2-0 score
Match 1 Pavlyuchenkova v Mertens
This is an evenly matched match where both players are at around even money to win the match.
The screen shot below shows the bets placed

As you can see I have put the margin stake onto Mertens 2-0 scoreline at odds of 11
This is a massive risk to reward scenario as I am risking nearly 89% of my £10.00 stake for a 25% return. One of the factors that has helped me make this decision is that I have downloaded all the results from the previous 3 WTA French Opens into a spreadsheet and filtered the results into following criteria.
1. Winners price at the start of the match is between 1.90 and 2.10
2. 2-0 set result
3. 4th round matches only
Having filtered these factors the resulting percentage of matches that ended 2-0 are just 3 from a total of 24 4th round matches – just 12.5%
If we drill this down even further to include ALL matches that ended 2-0 where the winners odds were between 1.9 and 2.1 we find that from 381 WTA French Open matches that have been played in the previous 3 years there was just 20 that is just over 5%
What we also have to remember is that we are only interested in the odds selected for movement only need to move so far in order to be matched. In close matches such as this a first set score of 5-5 could be enough to convince the market that the match could go to 3 sets.

As I said there are four 4th round matches today and the next one is between Muchiva and El Avanesyan
Muchova is odds on favourite to win at odds of 1.27

In this dutching trade I am risking 53% of my stake for a 25% return
While the risk to reward is much less than the previous match if we look at the spreadsheet and input the same figures in relation to this match ie where the Winning favourite was between 1.25 and 1.3 there was just 1 (one) match in the fourth round that ended 2-0 and just 21 out of all 381 French Open Matches from the previous 3 years.

The 3rd match of the day is between Svitolina and Kasatkina. Kasatkina is favourite at odds of 1.66 to win the match

The final match today is Stephens v Sabalenka where Sabalenka is 1.25 to win the match

With all dutch trades in place I will post the logs and final tally tomorrow
My Maximum loss for these four trades should they all lose is £27.39 out of £40.00
My Maximum Profit is £10.17
This signifies a 37% reward to risk factor but considering the very basic research I explored I am hopeful for a 75% strike rate

Profit or Loss from Dutching WTA French Open

As a follow on to my third post in this series I thought it would be interesting to see just how much profit or loss I would make by dutching all the WTA singles matches from day 2 of the tournament using just the following criteria.
Favourite starting odds of 1.20 or less
£10.00 total stake
Favourite to be backed at odds that would achieve a 10% profit margin



Player 1OddsPlayer 2Odds Matched OddsProfit
/Loss		Max Risk
Avanesyan7.00Bencic1.141.33£1.15£1.60
Vondrousova1.11Parks10.001.25£1.09£1.11
Ostapenko1.14Martincova6.81.33£1.13£1.64
Kudermetova1.09Karolia8.61.3£1.18£1.40
Total Profit for Day 2 £4.55 from 4 trades

Trading Tennis No 3. Dutching a Tennis Match

Dutching a Tennis match may seem a little bizarre as there are only 2 players but with the volatility of the market during in-play it is possible to trade in this way by backing the underdog at the outset at the same time as placing a back bet order into the market at odds higher than the current odds with the view that it will get matched at some point during the match. Some pre match research is essential when attempting this sort of trade so that you know roughly at what point your order is likely to be matched. This is done primarily with Bet Angels “Tennis Trader” tool. If you have read my previous posts on trading tennis you will know that this can be an invaluable way of predicting a feasible exit point for your trade and giving an insight to your potential risk to reward.
It is a fact that in Tennis the WTA is the most prolific for having breaks of service, even with the most accomplished players and the fact that that players who are vastly overwhelmed by their opponents experience can overcome some of that prowess by playing in “overdrive” in the first set. This can mean that players who start the match at odds in the region of 1.05-1.2 can see their odds of winning the match increase to a point where this strategy can yield a 10% return on your stake.
To illustrate this I have put a screenshot of the log I recorded yesterday of the match between Zidansek and Zheng. Zheng is seeded 19 and Zidansek is a qualifier.

As you can see Zheng started the match at odds of 1.16 but 10 minutes into the fist game her odds had risen to 1.34 before dropping back down to 1.18 and then back up to 1.3 and then back to 1.13. If we look at the actual game scores we can see that Zheng won the first two games breaking Zidansek’s serve in the second, but in the 3rd game Zidansek broke back to win the 3rd game and this is where these odds of 1.3 + would have occurred. This doesn’t mean that Zidansek was on to win the entire match it was just the market reacting to the in-play state of the match. Below is a screenshot of the first few games of the first set and as you can see Zidansek gave a fair account of herself.

So when we look at matches such as these “uncompetitive” matches as far as the starting odds would have it, there are some distinct possibilities that occur during the match and in particular in the first set that we can take advantage of. This is the essence of the trade I am going to outline in this post. If you have read my previous posts on tennis trading we are looking for the most reward against the least risk taken and to that end I am going to show you one match where there are two possible ways of making the same trade. For this I am going to turn to Bet Angel once again because it is the easiest way to place this trade into the market but this can easily be done manually as well by using a simple dutching calculator available for free on the internet. I will show this method later in the post. But first to Bet Angel. The screenshot below shows the Bet Angel dutching screen and the match loaded is between Vondrousova and Parks. Vondrousova is odds on to win with odds available to back at 1.10 Parks, the rank outsider is 10.00. We know that Vondrousova will 90 times out of 100 win this match, the odds tell us this so we would expect Parks odds to drift out to 1000 by the end of the match and we would be able to get any odds between 10.00 and 1000 matched at somepoint in the match so logic tells us that we should back Vondrousova at the start of the match and put an order into the market on Parks that is pretty certain to be matched at some point.

The Bet Angel Dutching tool enables us to select a margin of profit and total stakes If you look at the screen shot above the software is set to back Vondrousova for a stake of £9.99 and place an order into the market for a penny at odds of 1000 this, if it were possible, would net us 97p at the end of the match if Parks lost. The problem we have in this trade is that we would be risking £9.99 for a reward of 97p
If we now switch this around so that we are backing Parks at the onset of the match and placing an order to be matched in play on Vondrousova the risk to reward has been turned upside down

This trade would now put an order into the market on Vondrousova at odds of 1.25 for £8.89 and place a bet that would be matched straight away on Parks for £1.11 at odds of 10.00. We now are risking just £1.11 for a reward of £1.09 – Even Money. So what are the chances of Vondrousovas back bet being matched in play? If we look at Tennis Trader (Screenshot below) We can see that it would only take a break of serve in Parks’ favour and for her to hold her serve until the 6th game for this bet to be matched.

It would not be advisable to blanket dutch all matches that have a favourite starting the match at odds of say 1.20 or less in this way as you would need to research the players to get some sort of feel that is the underdog capable of breaking the serve if he/she goes all out in the 1st set. But for the purposes of this post I will do just that on all of the WTA 1st round matches on day 2 in the French open today that have a favourite that starts at odds of 1.2 or less and post the results tomorrow.


Now I said earlier that you can perform this trade without the aid of Bet Angel by using a simple Dutching Calculator. For this I will use OddsMonkeys very capable dutching calculator which is available to use for free (I will post a link below) In the sceenshot below I have populated the fields with all the relevant information
Stake £10
Parks Odds 10.00
Vondrousovas Odds 1.10
Commision 2% for both bets
I have set the stake to be split over all selections and for the individual stakes to be rounded to a penny.

As you can see we need to adjust the odds for Vondrousova to make the profit show our 10% target for this trade which is about a quid.

1.20 is not enough as it only produces a 66p profit over all

1.3 is too much as it gives a profit of £1.43

Bingo! we have our desired odds at which we will place our order on Vondrousova and what stakes to use AFTER we have placed our bet on Parks. There is just one thing to remember and it is vital. Once you have placed your Vondrousova order into the market you must set the bet to “KEEP” otherwise when the market goes in play your order would be cancelled and you would in effect have a quid on Parks to win only. One more thing to remember is that if you are doing this manually on betfair your minimum stake is £1.00 so you may need to adjust your total stake to bring that to that amount.

Link to OddsMonkey Calculators

If you are interested in using Bet Angel for free for 2 weeks click here for a 2 week free trial

Tennis Trading – Roland Garros – Trading the Fav in the first game only

As a follow on to my first post in this series I thought it would be interesting to see just how much profit or loss I would make by Trading the first game of all the WTA singles matches throughout the tournament using just the following criteria.
Favourite must be priced above 1.60 – 55 seconds before the start of the published start time.
Stakes are to a £10 back bet on the favourite in this timeframe

If you missed this post or any posts in the series click the link below

Trading Tennis



Because I am using Bet Angel Automation for this study the trade will be hedged automatically when the score for game 2 is 0-0 at least 1 minute after the match has gone in-play.
There are 20 ladies matches today (Sunday 28th May 2023)
Five Matches started at around 10:00 am
In the table below I have Nominated Player 1 as the Favourite

Day 1 WTA First Round Matches

Player 1ServingPlayer 2Fav odds matchedHedged oddsProfit/Loss
DiazNoSaunders1.982.22-£1.03
PodoroskaNoPonchet1.751.39£2.59
SabalenkaKostyuk<1.60N/A£0.00
ShymanovichUdvardy<1.60N/A£0.00
FrechZhang<1.60N/A£0.00
RakhimovaYesBejlek1.891.70£1.10
FrenandezNoLinette1.962.02-30p
SakkariNoMuchova1.971.38£4.27
TausonNoSasnovich1.671.5483p
MertensNoHruncakova<1.60N/A£0.00
GiorgiCornet<1.60N/A£0.00
BirrelYesJeanjean1.871.6£1.69
ZhengZidansek<1.6N/A£0.00
PotapovaTownsend<1.6N/A£0.00
BeguBondar<1.6N/A£0.00
PegulaCollins<1.6N/A£0.00
TeichmannErrani<1.6N/A£0.00
KasatkinaNiemeier<1.6N/A£0.00
SamsonovaVolynets<1.6N/A£0.00
SherifBrengal<1.6N/A£0.00
Total P/L Today £9.15

Day 2 WTA First Round Matches

Player 1ServingPlayer 2Fav odds matchedHedged oddsProfit/Loss
SerranoBogdon1.681.45£1.40
PeraKontveit1.831.6886p
PliskovaStephens1.912.14-£1.07
SvitolinaTrevisan1.761.6472p
KvitovaCocciaretto1.841.60-£1.47
MandlikWaltert1.912.18-£1.24
Total P/L Today -80p

I have only listed the matches in day 2 that fit the criteria outlined in the post and as you can see I made a small loss from the 6 matches. So far with this trade I have a profit of £8.35 in this WTA French Open

Day 3 WTA First Round Matches

Player 1ServingPlayer 2Fav odds matchedHedged oddsProfit/Loss
PetersonFerro1.742.04-£1.47
AzarenkaAndreescu1.621.85-£1.24
MarticRogers1.731.86-70p
DodinJanicijevic1.691.88-1.01
NoskovaKovinic1.751.6466p
Todays Loss – £3.76

Day 4 WTA Matches

Player 1Player 2Fav Matched OddsHedged OddsProfit/Loss
AndreescuNavarro1.761.5£1.70
DanilovicPaolini1.771.6384p
VekicPera1.831.53£1.92
TormoMartic1.892.16-£1.25
Todays Profit £3.21

Day 5 WTA Matches

Player 1Player 2Fav Matched OddsHedged OddsProfit/Loss
PotapovaPavlyuchenkova1.671.6418p
Muchova Begu1.721.6168p
Todays Profit 86p