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When you embark upon trading any sport whether it is football, racing or tennis it is so easy to watch youtube videos of trading situations and think “this is easy” and jump straight into a market and lose your bank!
While in depth research can be time consuming and at points seem repetitive some basic research should be undertaken if only to improve your chances of a better strike rate on your trades. The inescapable fact about trading is no matter how well you have researched a game, match or race you will not get a profit everytime, there will always be that odd market that will go against you.
Everyone on Youtube bangs on about “Risk to Reward” and it is a very viable point and the first thing you should look at is exactly how far a market is likely to move against you should a worst case scenario happen – because like as not it will probably happen.
For instance: If you are trading an Under 2.5 goals market in a football match you should try and establish what the probable odds would move to if an early goal was scored before your exit point was reached. How you do this is up to you but personally I use Soccer Mystic which is a great tool that comes with Bet Angel but that is a subject for another post but the essence is to know beforehand what two exit points you would employ should the trade go against you or if you are successful.
What research material is available for tennis and in-play odds that will help you in this task. The main source that I use is Tennis Trader which is a software product that comes with BetAngel. Once configured to the match you are planning to trade on you can see at a glance at what odds the market would likely be trading at if, for instance, you were laying the server in a tennis match and he/she won the game. The screenshot below shows the GAME Matrix for the 1st Game in the match between Gracheva and Galfi in the 1st round of the WTA French Open

In this match Gracheva is odds on favourite to win the match at odds of 1.36. If we were to lay her as server in this first game for a £10 stake our liability would be just £3.60. We know by looking at this matrix and following a path of events (by this I mean the points won or lost) we can quite acuratly know that if she won the game then in all likelyhood the market would move against us by just 3 or 4 ticks – See below.

If, however, Galfi plays a stroke of genius and wins the first two points then the market would move in our favour by about 10 ticks. as shown below.

From this information we can now establish some exit points that we would feel comfortable with once we have worked out what our maximum loss is likely to be. To do this we can use a simple hedge calculator as found on GoalProfits.com To work out our likely loss on this trade we simple enter the figures as shown below:

This shows that if Gracheva wins her service game and we exit at the end of the game we are only likely to lose 23p. Now that we know our likely loss on the game we can choose our exit point should Galfi win a couple of points early on in the game by doing exactly the same using the figures on the bottom of the matrix.

If Galfi won the first 2 points in the game and exited the trade at Grachevas odds of 1.46 then our profit would be 67p

Once we have established our risk to reward we can have a look at the match itself and there are various websites available to us and a favourite of mine is tennisexplorer.com and what I am looking for is any previous Head to Head matches these two have played and what surfaces to determine any trends.

We can see that on clay (depicted by the brown square) in 2019 the sets were quite close until the final set. This could suggest that games swing to and fro in early stages of the match and some further investgation is warranted.
Recent form can play a big part in the research and Flashscore.com can provide point by point results of previous matches.
If we now look at the first set of Galfi’s recent matches and in particular the first few games we can get a feel for how the games progress.

In these 3 recent matches you can see in Galfis’ first service game she can be a bit unsettled with points bouncing between the players and while this is going on the market is moving suggesting a trade possibility. We can now look at the same thing about her opponent

In Gracheva’s first service games it suggests that she is more aggressive winning her games with the least amount of serves in the early stages of the match.
The distinct possiblity of a back to lay trade on Grachevas first service game seems viable.
This is just some basic research into one match. Lets have a look what happened.

Gracheva was serving first and won her service game with ease – just 4 points played. Below is the log of this game which was captured by Betangel automation and it shows the odds every 30 seconds throughout the match and how they bounce around. This particular screenshot shows the first 3 minutes of the match and as you can see Gracheva’s odds started at 1.36 and hit a low of 1.23 – a drop of 13 ticks.

I am laughing out loud now 🤣 because if you look at the begining of the post I showed you the likely odds would drop by just 3 or 4 ticks if the first game ended like this and I think that I didn’t calibrate tennis trader before I grabbed the screen – oops
I stand by the suggested trade though as the basic research showed Gracheva to be an aggressive first game player and we could still have determined our likley exit point had the trade gone against us.