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.
Track
Winning Favs
Avg Stake
P/L
Crayford
1
45p
-£3.85
Doncaster
9 (2 Meetings)
69p
£4.73
Hove
6
£1.43 **
-£0.51
Monmore
10 (2 Meetings)
57p
£2.44
Newcastle
6
48p
£1.69
Oxford
8 (2 Meetings
63p
£1.26
Perry Barr
8
47p
£1.48
Romford
10 (2 Meetings)
53p
£3.03
Swindon
4
49p
£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 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.
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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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
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
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.
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
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 1
Serving
Player 2
Fav odds matched
Hedged odds
Profit/Loss
Diaz
No
Saunders
1.98
2.22
-£1.03
Podoroska
No
Ponchet
1.75
1.39
£2.59
Sabalenka
Kostyuk
<1.60
N/A
£0.00
Shymanovich
Udvardy
<1.60
N/A
£0.00
Frech
Zhang
<1.60
N/A
£0.00
Rakhimova
Yes
Bejlek
1.89
1.70
£1.10
Frenandez
No
Linette
1.96
2.02
-30p
Sakkari
No
Muchova
1.97
1.38
£4.27
Tauson
No
Sasnovich
1.67
1.54
83p
Mertens
No
Hruncakova
<1.60
N/A
£0.00
Giorgi
Cornet
<1.60
N/A
£0.00
Birrel
Yes
Jeanjean
1.87
1.6
£1.69
Zheng
Zidansek
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Potapova
Townsend
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Begu
Bondar
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Pegula
Collins
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Teichmann
Errani
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Kasatkina
Niemeier
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Samsonova
Volynets
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Sherif
Brengal
<1.6
N/A
£0.00
Total P/L Today £9.15
Day 2 WTA First Round Matches
Player 1
Serving
Player 2
Fav odds matched
Hedged odds
Profit/Loss
Serrano
Bogdon
1.68
1.45
£1.40
Pera
Kontveit
1.83
1.68
86p
Pliskova
Stephens
1.91
2.14
-£1.07
Svitolina
Trevisan
1.76
1.64
72p
Kvitova
Cocciaretto
1.84
1.60
-£1.47
Mandlik
Waltert
1.91
2.18
-£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
Yesterday I looked at trading a tennis match on just the first game of the first set in a tennis match. Today I will look at the risk to reward of a trade where, when the conditions are right, we can lay the favourite if he/she is serving for the 9th game and the scores are 4 games each in the first set. As I explained in the first post in this series we get the biggest movement of odds when a break of serve occurs in a set or match. If we look at a more critical stage of a match such as the later stages of the first set where the scores are level after the 8th game then if the favourite is serving the 9th game and his/her opponent can break the serve then they would be serving to win the set in the next game. I will use Bet Angels Tennis Trader feature to demonstrate this a little more clearly than just quoting numbers. In the screenshot below I have manually set the score to 4-4 in the first set of the first round match of the French Open between Nadia Podoroska and Jessika Ponchet. Podoroska is the favourite to win this match and will probably start the match at odds of somewhere around 1.75. If the first set reaches 4 games all then Tennis Trader project her odds to be around 1.78 (the figure ringed in the set matrix)
If Podoroska wins this service game then her odds would move in to 1.66, a movement of 12 ticks. If however Ponchet can break the serve at this critical stage of the set then she would then be serving for the set in game 10 and Podoroskas odds would move significantly the other way to somewhere around 2.88. This is a movement of around 65 ticks. We can now determine a trading strategy based on these two outcomes of the 9th game and place a trade accordingly knowing our potential loss or profit. Because the biggest movement in these two scenarios are upwards in terms of ticks then we would be looking to LAY Podoroska just before the start of the game. As we are putting our trade into the market during in-play we have to take account of the fact that betfair imposes a 3 second delay from when we place the lay bet to when it actually enters the market. While this shouldnt be a problem with high volume markets it could be a problem with markets that have low liquidity so this is one of the factors we should address when we are framing the trade – if there is low liquidity we may not getour lay bet matched. This aside we can work out our risk to reward in the following way. If we LAY Podoroska at odds of 1.78 for a stake of £10 then our Liability would be £7.80 If Podoroska goes on to win the game then we would have to trade out of the match by backing her at odds of 1.66 for a stake of 10.72 so our loss on this trade if podoroska wins the game would be in the region of 72p If Ponchet breaks Podoroska’s serve then with the same lay bet in place we would, at the end of the game , be able to place a back bet on Podoroska at odds of 2.88 for a stake of £6.18 giving us a profit of around £3.74 so our risk to reward would be 72p loss or £3.74 profit. These figures might be a bit bewildering and you might wonder how I came by them. The answer is simple I used a lay bet calculator freely available across the internet in particular I used the free hedging calculator on https://www.goalprofits.com/hedging-calculator/
I looked at 188 matches last week and set betangel to automatically trade a match where this scenario met the conditions above ie The favourite must be serving for the 9th game The game scores must be 4-4 I also added another condition that the odds of the favourite at the start of the 9th game must be between 1.5 and 1.9 Of the 188 matches only 5 met the criteria and 2 of these trades saw the favorite’s serve broken. If you want to learn more about automating trades such as these using bet angel you can download a trial copy by clicking this link
Yesterday saw the first post of a new series of posts highlighting the risk to reward options of various tennis trades. In this post I outlined 4 possible trades that were available to us on the very first game of the fist set. To visit this post click on this link.
The image below is a screenshot of the flashscore site showing the result of the first game and how it was won.
As you can see Bronzetti won this game breaking Grabhers service after 2 break points. The image below is the set matrix shown in yesterdays post and I have ringed the end of set odds.
There is another feature of Bet Angel that can help us analyse our trades and this is an ability to log each players odds at whatever intervals you wish throughout the match. This enables you to see the way the odds moved as each point is won or lost. I have provided a screenshot of the 1st 6 1/2 minutes of the 1st game below.
The time elemnts of this spreadsheet are actual time ie 12:24:11 pm and if you follow the odds for Bronzetti which in this case are logged every 30 seconds you can see that her odds in the first game after 6 minutes play (12:30:14) they bottomed out at 1.39. In the next screen shot I have added the scores and you can see that when Bronzetti won a point her odds dropped and when Grabher served her 2 points that she won the odds rose slightly
Yesterday I outlined 4 different trades that we could have done on this first game in the match and Trade 2 had the best risk to reward option for us. The odds for Bronzetti to win the match at the time of writing yesterdays post was 1.74 however this was at 7 am – 5 hours before the start of the match. When the match finally started at 12:24 pm her odds had dropped to 1.69. Tennis Trader predicted that if Bronzetti won the game then her odds would be around 1.44 they actually reached 1.39.
In this case our best trade option won out and we profited by it Please subscribe to my blog if this has peaked an interest in trading tennis as I will be sharing lots more opportunities for making educated decisions on trading tennis matches and its more exciting than laying the draw in a football match.
Trading tennis might be quite daunting at first but when you actually look at some key points in tennis matches this can be a great introduction into the bewildering world of sports trading. There are so many opportunities to make (and lose) money in this activity, that many “match bettors” that have made the progression from having their betting accounts “gubbed” to gravitating to the only real option left open to them in their betfair account. With there being so many markets available every day and so much “advice” being forced on naive beginners, many lose money and therefore lose interest. In this series of blog posts I will aim to point out some of the more obscure trading opportunities I have discovered which are of less risk and more reward. Sports trading is a risk, and while you are never putting your full stake at risk there is always the greater probability that the trade will go against you and you will have to trade out of the market for a loss. This can be for a variety of reasons, lack of knowledge and lack of research being just 2. Many beginners to trading will perhaps watch a couple of YouTube videos where the presenter makes trading look so easy and lucrative that they just jump into a similar market that was shown and try and do exactly the same with catastrophic consequences. As a potential trader you must have, at the very least a working knowledge of how various markets behave. Tennis, to my mind, could be the sport where this can be learned quite easily and with a relatively low risk to your stake.
Tennis markets are primarily driven by what is actually going on in the match itself. Unlike football markets which flow in a determined direction and only react after a goal is scored, tennis markets can fluctuate wildly to the uneducated eye but there are certain points within tennis matches that can present us with a good “low risk high reward” opportunities. One of these points is the break of serve. There are always breaks of serve in tennis matches – that is how they are won or lost but finding the right point to make a trade needn’t be rocket science. At this point I must make it clear that I have a distinct advantage as I have a subscription to a piece of software called Bet Angel and this particular, and at the present time subsequent posts on this subject, come from watching and understanding videos made by the founder of the software, Peter Webb. Knowing at what point to try and trade a break of serve and how to gain the maximum profit or lose the minimum loss can be determined by oberving countless tennis matches and noting the odds of each player at each point of the game and building your own giant database which might be ready to use in perhaps 10 years or you could use a feature of bet angel called Tennis Trader. The figures I have used below are from Tennis Trader and are from the WTA Rabat2023 Final being played today at 12:00 between Julia Grabher and Lucia Bronzetti, and at the time of writing this blog the Match odds are Bronzetti 1.74 and Grabher 2.35 giving a near perfect “book” of 100.5%. This fact is however irrelevant as we are just interested in who is the favourite and the possibilities of what could happen in the course of the first set. Using Tennis Trader I am going to investigate various scenarios where a break of serve happens and what effect it would have on the market and the risk to reward. Below you will see a screenshot of the Tennis Trader Set Matrix for the first set which when calibrated to the match gives a fair representation of how the market would behave.
If we assume that Grabher is serving first and she wins her first game then the odds for her to win the match would move from 2.35 to 2.21 giving just a 6 tick move but if Bronzetti breaks her serve in the first game then her odds would move out to 3.29 this is a move of 39 ticks. The odds for Bronzetti in the same instances would be as follows Bronzettis odds if Grabher holds serve 1.74 to 1.83 – 9 ticks Bronzettis odds if Grabher loses her serve 1.74 to 1.44 -30 ticks
In money terms as a trade using £10 stakes for both back and lay bets and “Greening” or hedging the trade at the end of the game (remember tennis is split into games sets and matches dont get confused when i say end of game – it means the end of the present game – not the entire match) the following scenarios would produce the following profit and losses.
TRADE OPTION 1 We BACKED Grabher at odds of 2.35 – Liability £10 potential Profit £13.50 less 2% commission. Grabher Won the game: We hedged our stake at odds of 2.21 with a lay bet of £10.61 – after commission we gained 40p Grabher Lost the game: We Traded out our stake at odds of 3.29 with a lay stake of £7.10 – We lost £3.02. The risk to reward on this trade would be lose £3.02 or win 40p
TRADE OPTION 2 We BACKED Bronzetti at odds of 1.74 – Liability £10 Potential profit £7.40 less 2% commission. Grabher Won the game: We hedged our stake at odds of 1.83 with a lay bet of £9.53 – after commission we lost 65p Grabher Lost the game: We Traded out our stake at odds of 1.44 with a lay stake of £12.15 – We Won £1.91 The risk to reward on this trade would be lose 65p or win £1.91 As you can see the most we would have lost would have been £3.02 roughly a third of our stake in the first scenario or 65p in the second scenario. The most we would have won is £1.91 in the second scenario as opposed to 40p in the first scenario. Peter Webb refers this to “Framing a Trade” which is to say you can determine your potential for losses and gains and so determine the better strategy.
If we now look at the same game but we LAY our players at the onset of the game. TRADE OPTION 3 We LAY Grabher at odds of 2.35 for a stake of £10 making our liability £13.50 Grabher Won the game: We hedged our stake at odds of 2.21 with a BACK bet of £10.63 – We LOST 63p Grabher Lost the game: We Traded out our stake at odds of 3.29 with a lay stake of £7.14 – After commission We Won £2.80. The risk to reward on this trade would be lose 63p or win £2.80 TRADE OPTION 4 We LAY Bronzetti at odds of 1.74 for a stake of £10 making our liability £7.40 Grabher Won the game: We hedged our stake at odds of 1.83 with a BACK bet of £9.43 – We WON 53p after Commission Grabher Lost the game: We Traded out our stake at odds of 1.44 with a BACK stake of £12.08 – We LOST £2.08. The risk to reward on this trade would be lose £2.08 or win 53p
The scenarios above each have their merits and pitfalls and this is the essence of framing a trade so that you have the potential for a maximum gain against a minimal loss. With this particular trade strategy where the players are priced similarly to this and the Favourite is not serving first then we could lose 3 out of 4 of these trades and still bet at a break even point in our money. getting a 50% strike rate would see us building our bank nicely to increase our stakes steadily as our bank grows. The screenshot below depicts the scenario of Bronzetti serving first in the first set and if you compare the differences you will see that the odds predicted by Tennis Trader are slightly different from that of Grabner serving first. This highlights the need to do some basic research before we jump into trades and knowing our entry and exit points
There are other basic factors which should be taken into consideration such as the playing surface – On grass courts the speed of the ball at serve is quicker and the bounce lower making return of serve just that little bit harder than on clay courts which are slower and the bounce higher giving a better chance of return serve Gender also can play a big part in the way you frame your trades. Ladies tennis matches tend to see a greater number of breaks of serve than in mens matches.
The match highlighted today was picked at random and if you read this post before the match starts try watching the first game just to see which scenario played out and which scenario you would have traded. As with all trading and betting systems the risk is always present and you should fully understand how any market works before jumping in with both feet. Having said that however this is a trading opportunity which has a relatively low risk attached to it and as such could be pursued after doing some sample trades on paper. Tennis Trader can be an invaluable tool in this but these trades are entirely possible with just a little caution and research.
Next post will look at doing the same sort of trade but further into the set when there can be more movement in the markets which we can benefit from while keeping our risk to a minimum. If you want to keep abreast of this trading series and how well the trades go please subscribe to my blog to receive these posts as I produce them.
If you are more interested and want to try betangel software please click this link below where you can download a trial copy of the full package. The software has a practice mode where by you can place trades into the markets without any risk to your betfair bank.
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