In play trading – Betornot

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.

Timeform 5* selections for 8th June 2024

Timeform is a respected and well followed source of racing form and they rate each horse for each race by using a star rating. You may have read my post on using this rating system to pick your horses for the ITV 7 well what if you were to back each 5 star rated horse in every race for a day.
Below is a PDF of the 5 star Runners for 8th June 2024 and how they faired. The figures are based upon the ISP (Industry Starting Price) and the stakes reflect a £5.00 profit should the horse win. It is worth noting that at least one of these selections (Billyb) was available at odds greater than the starting price as I actually backed it at odds of 4.50 at 11am that morning.

08-june-2024-timeform-5-star-selections Download

If you had backed each 5 star rated horse that ran on this day to a £1.00 level stake you would have got a profit of £3.87 which is a 10.18% ROI (Return on Investment)
If you had backed them as I do to a £5.00 target profit then you would have a £24.93 profit but the stakes involved are greater! My total stakes for all races would have been £117.94 for that £24.93 profit but it is still a 21% ROI
After a quick analysis of the results there were a total of 38 runners of which 15 won which is a 39.5% strike rate.
More interestingly is the fact that if you had backed the horses which ran in just the handicap races then of the 31 handicap races run 27 actuall ran of which 12 won.
This gave a profit of £12.41 to level £1.00 stakes giving a 46% ROI. Staking the horses to a £5.00 target profit gave a profit of £32.52 for a total of £58.79 stake money yielding a 55.3% ROI.
This is just 1 days analysis but it seems that it may be worth pursuing further.

timeforms-5-star-rated-horses Download

The above file can be downloaded so you can do your own analysis

More on this to come
Follow me to stay in the loop.

My ITV 7 8th June 2024 – The Results

7 races – 7 winners how hard can it be?
The criteria for this exercise in losing money is that I selected Timeforms 5 star runners and where these were non runners as in race 3 and 7 the next best 4 star runner with the lowest odds.

Race 1:
14:05 Beverley
Maw Lam backed at 3/1 for a stake of £1.67
Lost

Running P/L -£1.67

Race 2
14:15 Bangor on Dee
Can’t beat history backed at 4.5 for £1.42
Lost

Running P/L -£3.09

Race 3
14:25 Haydock
Divina Grace backed at 3.5 or £2.00
Lost

Running P/L -£5.09

Race 4
14:40 Beverley
Moving Force backed at 2.75 for £2.86
Lost

Odds moved slightly in my favour but still no return
Running P/L -£7.95

Race 5
15:00 Haydock
Sea Theme backed at 5.50 for a stake of £1.11
Lost

Running P/L -£9.06

Race 6
15:15 Beverley
Billyb backed at 4.5 for a stake of £1.43
Won 🤑

A rule 4 deduction reduced my profit from £5.00 to £4.75
Running P/L -£4.31

Race 7
15:35 Haydock
Ramazan backed at odds of 6.00 for a stake of £1.00
Lost

Total Loss for todays ITV 7 is £5.31

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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Trading Tennis Matches

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.

Trading Tennis No 1 Break of Serve

Should we follow the Racing Post selections that are in CAPITALISED in the race preview?

The Racing Post, a respected and some would say a vital part of British and Irish racing. The content of the paper and on line version of the only real guide to days racing is second to none but should we do our own research or just back the runners that are in BOLD in the race preview that can be found on many betting sites. I think that the Racing Post has a reputation to uphold so why would bookmakers willingly put the racing post preview at the head of the race page. Sceptical attitudes may say that if the bookies are willingly publishing these views by “Verdict” from the racing post then statistically they (the bookies) will win over all. Todays meetings come from Bellowstown, Kempton, Doncaster, Uttoxeter, Stratford, and Chelmsford City.

Looking for Level Stakes profit to £1.00 stake for all races
Lets see how they get on.

First meeting in order of timing today is Bellewstown
13:20 Fast Tara (Abandoned)
13:55 Master Garvey (Abandoned)
14:30 Ten to Ten (Abandoned)
15:05 Escapingthejungle (Abandoned)
15:40 Tawaazon (Nap) (Abandoned)
16:15 Theonewedreamof (Abandoned)
16:50 Star Kissed (Abandoned)

Kempton Meeting starts at 13:30
13:30 Burgar LOST
14:05 Phantom Flight LOST
14:40 Brains LOST
15:15 Aztec Empire (Nap) LOST
15:50 Fix You
16:25 Cuban Breeze
17:00 Simply Sondheim

Doncaster next and the first race goes off at 13:50
13:50 Valadero LOST
14:25 Dirtyoldtown LOST
15:00 Asjad LOST
15:35 Awaal (Nap)
16:10 Poker Face
16:45 Ribal
17:20 Aldbourne
17:50 Aone Ally

Uttoxeter
14:10 Tonto Foley LOST
14:45 Sporting Ace LOST
15:20 Corey’s Courage LOST
15:55 Blackjack Magic
16:30 Gold Emery
17:05 Had to be Hugo (Nap)
17:35 Mistral Milly

The final meeting of the afternoon is from Stratford
14:17 Beau Balko LOST
14:52 The Grey Falco (Nap) LOST
~~15:27 Weebil LOST~~
16:02 Lamanver Bel Ami
16:37 Go Steady
17:12 Banteer

The sole evening meeting is from Chelmsford City and first race goes off at 17:30.
17:30 Vitralite
18:00 Boasty
18:30 Prenup (Nap)
19:00 Iconic Moment
19:30 Beyond Equal
20:00 Pending Appeal
20:30 Heath Rise

I have annotated the Nap selections for each meetings but will list them again here
Bellowstown 15:40 Tawaazon (Nap)
Kempton 15:15 Aztec Empire (Nap)
Doncaster 15:35 Awaal (Nap)
Uttoxeter 17:05 Had to be Hugo (Nap)
Stratford 14:52 The Grey Falco (Nap)
Chelmsford 18:30 Prenup (Nap)

Creating your own Horses to Follow list

Having just belatedly received my Jumpers to follow list for the 2021/22 season (I got it at half price) I thought that following horses halfway through the season might not be an altogether bad thing as you can see how they have done so far in the season. I then got to thinking why not make my own list but not of good prospects this season which are usually aimed at big races but day to day runners which I can back to lay in-running.
The sheer volume of horses racing each day could make this a task of monumental proportions so I started to whittle down the most prevalent horses each day, concentrating on predominately front running horses. As I subscribe to The In-Running Trading Tool I can see at a glance horses that prefer to lead races and provide a good opportunity to make small but regular profits win or lose. This, however is not foolproof, and just because it ran well and the traders backed it down to odds on in-running the last two runs doesn’t mean it will do the same this time. There are many factors that will and do change how a horse will run a race such as going, distance, a jockey change or even a stable change. This latter factor may not be as prevalent as the late great Dick Francis portrays in his most excellent novels but it does happen.
Once I have a couple of good prospects for the day I can then switch over to the Timeform website and check any pace hints that they provide for the race and if the horse is mentioned I then go to the sporting Life website where I can usually watch the horses previous races to get a feel for how it ran. Having satisfied myself that I can risk a bet I will then look at the exchange – usually betfair – and look at the price changes via the provided chart to determine whether the odds are steadily drifting out or static or starting to come in and try and judge the best time to place a small bet. Once the bet is on then I continue to monitor the odds to note any changes.
Once the bet is on I will then place a lay bet at the closest “cross-over” point (Exchange cross-over points are points in the exchange range of odds where the range of odds change and betfair describe them as follows)

“There are points in the Betfair odds system that we call “crossover points”. These are around odds such as 4.0 where the tick below is 3.95 (0.05 away) and the tick above is 4.1 (0.10 away). It often makes sense to lay at odds of 4.0 as your risk is lower than your reward over the short-term.

Because of this, you often see the market pause at price changes. Support and resistance can become imbalanced too, as lots of people are keen place their lay bets. You might also see the market spike downwards if it breaks through a crossover point, as all of the layers scurry to close out of their positions.”

I place this below the backed odds and ensure that I change the Lay from “cancel” at in-play to “keep” This will ensure that my bet lay bet will still be available once the race is off.
If the back to lay trade is successful after the race has finished or in some cases before the race is actually at post time then the horse can be added to the “Follow” spreadsheet. To make things easy and to get an alert when the horse is next running I also add it to my Timeform Tracker list which I have set up to send me a “push” notification the evening before the race as well as an email.

The information that is available for your chosen horses is vast so choosing what Information to record can be overwhelming however Excel is a truly outstanding piece of software which can be utilised for as much or as little as you think is relevant.
I have provided a workbook for anyone to download and use. It is populated with 1 horse (Best Trition) and a template sheet for you.
The front page is an index page which is handy for you to summarise and quickly access the runners record as well as

back-to-lay-horses-to-follow-template Download

Having done all this I can now wait patiently for emails to arrive and determine the probability of a successful back to lay bet without trawling through reams of information which might sway me into a bad decision.
When you have established your “Stable” and have grown some confidence in your selections you can start to determine how far your lay bet you are willing to make away from your back bet. To help you in this I have also provided a “tick-drop” calculator. This simple spreadsheet will enable you to instantly work out the odds needed for a 10, 20 or 30 tick drop from the actual back odds taken.

betfair-tick-counter1 Download

For more information on back to laying horses please read my post below

Making an Exchange Lay Bet and calculating your liability to use in your “Back to Lay” Trade

Understanding the movement of in-play odds in the Over/Under goals Markets

Understanding the initial direction of the Over or Under goals markets on a betting exchange when the game goes in-play and the different speeds that the market moves is key to judging your risk when trading. Grasping this and understanding what happens when a goal is scored is half the battle to making profit in these markets.
As a game goes in-play the probability of a goal being scored begins to diminish when you are trading the Over goals market which means that the odds will increase as the minutes tick away. Depending on which Over market you are attempting to trade, when a goal does go in, the odds will take a very steep drop to a level where the probability of the market being fulfilled will reflect in the odds depending on what time the goal was scored. For instance If you had laid the Over 2.5 goals and the first goal went in after 5 minutes then there are 85 more minutes of the game left for the remaining 2 goals to be scored and the probability of this happening will reflect as very high and the odds will plummet to a point which would put you into a loss position in the market. If, however, the first goal wasnt scored until the 85th minute then the probability of 2 more goals being scored in the final 5 minutes is very low and the movement in the odds would be slight, if at all.
To demonstrate this visually I am going to use a smart bit of software called BetAngel and a feature in the program called “Soccer Mystic”. This will “predict” the odds during a predetermined game if or when goals are scored. There is a game tonight in the English Championship between Barnsley and Swansea City and for no other reason that it is first alphabetically will serve my purpose admirably.
At the time of posting this the predicted lay odds on the Over 2.5 goals market is 1.91. While this is just a predicted odds level at kick-off the market can be different depending on factors such as team sheet announcements, but for the purposes of this it will suit. If we say that we have a lay bet of £5.00 at odds of 1.91 this would give us a liability (total ammount we can lose) of £4.55 at kick-off. We can use “Soccer Mystic” to see our profit/loss should a goal be scored in the fifth minute. The screen shot below shows the predicted odds if no goal is scored in minute 5 and the predicted odds if there was a fifth minute goal

Barnsley v Swansea predicted odds after 5 minutes

As you can see we can determine our risk if there was a goal in the 5th minute and this would be a loss of £2.08 if we traded out. In the next screen shot Soccer Mystic also gives a visual representation of how the market “recovers” as the match progresses and can give us an indication as to when we could trade out for no loss if while watching the match we ascertain that the first goal was a fluke i.e. own goal or a lucky fumble in the box and decide to let the bet run to our predetermined exit point.

The predicted odds are shown by the red line in the graph and as you can see after the first goal going in at the 5th minute the odds plunged to 1.34 but then as the game progresses and no other goal is scored the market recovers slowly to rise after about 35 minutes in-play time to a break even point where we can exit the trade for a no loss/profit. In the graph the horizontal blue line is the “profit” line and when we are laying the market when the red line is above the blue a profitable trade is possible.
As with all things betting or trading research is the key and you may have noticed that I mentioned a predetermined exit point. After doing some really basic research on this game tonight I came to a decision, provisionally, that the first goal probably, using previous games as a guide that perhaps, barring fluke goals, the first goal might be some time after the 17th minute. Using this as our control point we can set out exit point at 15 minutes win or lose

In the screen shot above I have pointed the cursor at 15 minutes and in the ringed box shows us that the predicted odds after 15 minutes when the first goal was scored after 5 mins would be about 1.49. This would leave us in a losing position but if we were right and the next goal went in at minute 17 then our loss would be greater. If of course no goal was scored and we trade out at 15 minutes Soccer Mystic can show us our predicted profit as shown below.

I am sure you are thinking “what if I want to back over 2.5 goals ” then the opposite applies and if you had backed this market at the odds shown and a quick goal was scored then the odds would move dramatically in your favour to enable you to trade out at a profit. as shown below.

Barnsley v Swansea back bet 5 minute goal

We would exit this trade at this point for a £1.93 profit and this would be great but again when we go into this trade we need to pick an exit point and having done the same research we think that the first goal will be at about 17 minutes how far past this point do we go if no goals are scored. If we pick our exit point at say 25 minutes and no goals are scored Soccer Mystic can show us what sort of loss we would expect to take as demonstrated below

Barnsley v Swansea 25 minute goal on a back bet

As you can see an overall loss of £1.95 would be our exit loss.
To summarise if we are laying an “Over” market the odds rise steadily in our favour and continue to provide the potential profit but as soon as a goal is scored our profit potential vanishes to be replaced with the very great risk of a losing trade, on the flip side, if we back the “over” market then our position is of a losing trade until a goal goes in and the earlier the better.

Just for fun there are 7 championship matches tonight and the average time for a first goal this season in the championship league is 32 minutes the following 7 screen shots show what you could expect to win if you laid the Over 2.5 goals market and each game remained goalless until this point.

These 7 screenshots predict the odds and probable trade out profit if there were no goals in their respective games

Lay The Draw and Trade out after the First Goal. The Results

The automation files for this trade performed without a hitch and a profit was made even though Manchester City floundered badly losing 2-0 to Crystal Palace.
The lunchtime kick-off was between Leicester City and Arsenal and as we lunched at the Greyhound Inn at Milton Malsor, Arsenal scored in the 5th minute. At 12:36 Betangel detected the goal and duly placed a back bet into the draw market 25 miles away from where I was tucking into my Gammon Egg and Chips and the first trade was settled for a profit of £1.28 whatever the outcome of the game after 90 mins.

The two screenshots above show, firstly, how the bets were placed and secondly the timings, stake, market and odds of each lay and back bets. Nothing in the research predicted the outcome of this match apart from there being at least 1 goal scored which was enough as soccer mystic indicated that which ever side scored first we would see a profitable trade being made.
The second researched game was the Burnley v Brentford game at 3pm. As mentioned in the research there were no previous meetings of these two sides so it all came down to this seasons form in the goals department and again the research bore no resemblance to the actual match played as Burnley opened the scoring after 4 minutes.

£2.10 was the profit taken from this trade but whether it was a VAR factor or a betfair operative going to sleep the market did not become unsuspended for 5 minutes after a somewhat confusing 11 minutes of the game kicking off either way a goal caused the market to move in our favour and a successful trade was executed 11 minutes after the official time of the goal.

Early goals seemed to be the trend yesterday as Liverpool opened their account with a 4th Minute goal from Henderson creating a £4.05 profit for us. 2 minutes after the goal went in the odds of the draw had risen to 12.0 and Betangel duly placed a back bet into the market of £5.83 which was matched 6 minutes and 36 seconds

Total profit so far £7.43

The only losing trade was the Manchester City v Crystal Palace fixture, where, after 6 minutes the second worst thing after a goalless match happened, Crystal Palace scored!! The resulting back bet placed, unemotionally, by betangel made a £9.09 LOSS. This was a slightly better outcome than the scenario projected by Soccer Mystic of a £10.74 loss after a Crystal Palace first goal but at least the bookies are opening the Bolanger this morning.

In contrast to the other games so far it took Chelsea 65 minutes to score the first goal in this game and this gave us the largest profit of the day after backing the draw at odds of 9.4. This made the trade profit at £5.01. I am beginingg to wonder if this is fun or heart failure provoking 🤣.

Che Adams opened the scoring in the Watford v Southampton game 10 minutes after our research suggested. This resulted in our trade making £2.69 profit and as the half time whistles echoed around the grounds we were £1.03 in profit.

Total profit for all researched matches after Chelsea’s 65th Minute Goal came to £6.04
It would be unfair for me not to point out that Laying the draw on the five 3pm games at a stake of £10.00 would need a betfair balance of £250.00.