blue4578 Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 You don't need hundreds of thousands to get started. In fact, that would be crazy if you've never done it before. Although even just backing and laying for £20 liabilities on every outcome across 46 matches would require about £2,000. As I said, I think laying across many markets is the way to go, much better than putting all of your eggs into one basket, or a very small number of baskets. I wish I'd started doing what I was doing years before I did, as I remember the days when at 2:55pm on a Saturday you could sometimes lay 4/1 shots at 6/4 on Betfair for decent sums as there was no money in the markets. It's much more competitive these days, which is one reason I'm trying to do the same thing on Betdaq now since the liquidity there is like it was at Betfair 7 or 8 years ago. In fact, if you're going to start laying football for fairly modest stakes, use Betdaq not Betfair. The Betdaq commission is 2.5% till the end of June and for fairly small stakes, you can get people to take silly prices far more easily, particularly if you get your money up early. Your question is an interesting one, and again the answer I'm going to give is very specific to me. I tend to find that using the method I described for football laying, most of the time I'm either backing the favourite or alternatively laying the favourite and backing the draw (there is almost always value in the draw if the favourite is too short). My method doesn't lead me to back outsiders particularly often. The worst thing you can do it try to get all, or most, of your bets matched. You have a price that is as low as you'll go when backing and as high as you'll go when laying. You have to draw the line somewhere. I ran into problems a couple of years ago when I was doing really well, and started thinking that I'd do even better if I got more bets matched. As I said above, I'm quite rigid with my book back percentage, which is nearly always within a percent of 89%. This margin is high enough not to have to worry too much about being too generous. However I've always been flexible with my lay percentage as every game is different. However at one point I decided that I was going to lay everything to 106% or so. This meant tweaking the prices that I was comfortable laying, and pushing them a bit higher most of the time to get the book percentage down to 106%. This resulted in me laying bets that I didn't really want to be laying at the prices I was laying. Over a period of a month I went from making a very decent sum nearly every Saturday to breaking even or being slightly down. I readily accept that I'm going to get no more than 30% at the very most of the bets I put up matched. Those that do get matched, I have a very decent edge. There's no point reducing that edge too much trying to chase bigger profits by having more bets matched. If you want to make more profit, keep the margins the same but increase the stakes. Football is a unique case though. The sport that I stake the most on over the course of a year is baseball, which makes up about 40% of my betting approximately (and is why, along with the NBA, I was still up in the middle of the night last night ). I can quite happily lay to 102.5% or so and make a consistent profit on baseball, as the margins are always small and it's generally much more of an exact science calculating the probabilities of teams winning as there are statistics for everything you can possibly imagine. As an example, if you're laying to 102.5% and the game is a real 50/50 call, you'd be laying 1.95 each side. When it comes to football, if I thought that a team was 50% likely to win, I wouldn't lay higher than 1.9, except on very rare occasions like a very high-profile match between two top teams. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IrishBhoy Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 Blue I dont want to sound like an arse licker here but you seem very knowledgable about this. Ive been backing and laying a few different markets at £2 bets and making decent profit considering. My question to you is do you beleive there is money to be made in backing and laying tennis matches when the game is in the balance n I dont know if it was just luck but I was backing Karlovich with a £2 stake and laying him £2.2 and I made about £13 profit. The obvious thing to think is if i had been doing that with £200 pound would I have made £1300 or was that a sort of one off 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue4578 Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 Yes. Some people I know make hundreds of thousands of pounds per year trading in-running on tennis and doing nothing else. In fact, along with football and horse racing it is the most popular in-running sport. The growth in the amounts gambled in-running on tennis far exceeds other sports over the past few years. The key thing, obviously, is to make the right trade/bet at the right time, which is easier said than done. One warning I would give you is that some people have very up-to-date television feeds and some people even have people present courtside to give them instant updates. Therefore if you're betting point to point rather than inbetween games, be very careful about getting picked off by people with more up to date information. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nightmare Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 Good stuff Blue, very helpful. Had a solid return from laying against top 5/10/making the cut on the Masters, so I've got some funds to play with and try out some things. Going to try it out on maybe one league at first with a few quid on each outcome, and then if it's working for me, increase the number of teams + stake. About the NBA and MLB, I've always thought with the way those sports are structured, that it would be more difficult to make an educated prediction. What I mean by that is like how there are so many more games per season in those leagues than there is in football or the NFL, and players will often be rested, or only play a small part in games. I've seen NBA games where the team is up by 30, only for the losing team to claw back a lot more points in garbage time because the winning team has long since benched all their starters. Is there a way around things like this or is my assumption that this makes it tougher to predict winners just wrong? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IrishBhoy Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 Blue, I was just re-reading your post about backing and laying all 46 english league games. Say you back all your teams at 3.3, and lay at 2.8. Are you not taking a bit of a risk if you get an unusually low percentage amount of your lays matched, coupled with bad luck in that your backed match bets dont come in. Im struggling to fully understand the concept and may be missing something obvious. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue4578 Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 About the NBA and MLB, I've always thought with the way those sports are structured, that it would be more difficult to make an educated prediction. What I mean by that is like how there are so many more games per season in those leagues than there is in football or the NFL, and players will often be rested, or only play a small part in games. I've seen NBA games where the team is up by 30, only for the losing team to claw back a lot more points in garbage time because the winning team has long since benched all their starters. Is there a way around things like this or is my assumption that this makes it tougher to predict winners just wrong? Baseball is the sport with the tightest margins. The best bookmakers are happy laying the moneyline to 102.5% or even slightly lower. It's hard to find an edge, so you have to be very strict with the prices you're backing and laying. With other sports, sometimes you just get a very strong feeling that a team or player will or won't win. With baseball this is much harder as any team can beat any other, with the old cliche being that every team will win 60 games and every team will lose 60 games (they play 162). It's almost always true. You can get good value bets, but typically over a season I'll only make 2%-3% profit on my total stakes. I'll make a far higher percentage on football or tennis, but I can stake much more on baseball as there are games every day (2430 in all) and plenty of places to bet decent stakes. I don't think I'm going to bet seriously on baseball this season anyway as it's just too much hard work and antisocial hours, and I don't really need the money any more. In MLB teams will field their strongest lineups throughout the season. Starting pitchers only pitch once every five or six days, everyone else can handle playing every day except relief pitchers who may get rested if they've pitched three or four days in a row. The only slight exception to this is September, the last month of the regular season. Teams are allowed to expand their rosters from 25 to 40 players, so some younger players will get a chance to play, particularly on teams out of playoff contention. The NBA is a strange sport. Year upon year, teams lose that have been matched at 1.01 in-running on Betfair far more often than they should (there was one last night). Teams can play the score far better than other sports, and you'll often find teams getting well ahead being pegged back. The difference with MLB is that 16 teams make the playoffs in the NBA as opposed to 8 in MLB. Therefore there isn't quite the same intensity with most regular season games. For example this year, the 16 playoff spots were wrapped up a few days ago, so for the last week of the season teams are only playing for seedings. The worst teams also prefer to lose to improve their draft lottery chances. You have to take all this into account, but it can take a bit of getting used to. For me personally, I bet mainly on the total number of points in the game, it's far easier to win than betting totals on football for example as the scoring is continuous. Blue, I was just re-reading your post about backing and laying all 46 english league games. Say you back all your teams at 3.3, and lay at 2.8. Are you not taking a bit of a risk if you get an unusually low percentage amount of your lays matched, coupled with bad luck in that your backed match bets dont come in. Im struggling to fully understand the concept and may be missing something obvious. It isn't that important if you have a week where you don't get much matched. Every bet that you do get matched should be very good value and the odds should be in your favour. If you know how to price games up, then you can think of it like tossing a coin several times. If you've got an edge in the prices you're laying, it's like getting odds of 11/10 for predicting heads or tails. If you toss a coin 25 times on a Saturday afternoon and are getting paid out at 11/10 each time you call it right, sometimes due to the relatively small sample size you'll make a loss. If you toss the coin 25 times per week over 40 weeks, 1000 times in all, the chances of making a loss are almost zero. If you're really good at pricing games up, the odds for tossing the coin could be 6/5 or bigger, and your chances of making a loss would be much smaller still. Betting always comes down to simple probability. It's not an exact science pricing up sporting events, like it is working out probability for tossing coins or rolling dice, but the principle is exactly the same. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fanny paddery Posted April 13, 2011 Author Share Posted April 13, 2011 Is it just my laptop or has the paddy power site been down most of the night? Yeah it has been down all night. Just a word of warning for the betfair users, I am a member of the feedback community and have been reading recently of quite a few guys getting their account hacked and wiped. Betfair will take no liability for this so rememeber to keep your anti virus up to date and regularly change your password. My account was accesed about a week ago but due to little funds none of it was touched. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraser_smfc Posted April 14, 2011 Share Posted April 14, 2011 I'm looking to bet on the Semi Final games this weekend (Celtic and Motherwell to win). But I'm wondering if this means specifically at the end of the 90 minutes or will the bookies pay out even if Celtic win after extra time, say? I do the odd coupon now and again but cup competitions are new for me. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CM. Posted April 14, 2011 Share Posted April 14, 2011 I'm looking to bet on the Semi Final games this weekend (Celtic and Motherwell to win). But I'm wondering if this means specifically at the end of the 90 minutes or will the bookies pay out even if Celtic win after extra time, say? I do the odd coupon now and again but cup competitions are new for me. Bookies only pay out after 90 minutes, unless you back the teams 'to qualify' rather than just 'to win'. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fraser_smfc Posted April 15, 2011 Share Posted April 15, 2011 Bookies only pay out after 90 minutes, unless you back the teams 'to qualify' rather than just 'to win'. That's fantastic, cheers bud! Have a greeny. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paco Posted April 15, 2011 Share Posted April 15, 2011 Can you do an accumulator which incorporates a draw no bet? And if so, what's the deal if someone draws and the rest come up? Is the draw effectively removed from your line? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blue4578 Posted April 15, 2011 Share Posted April 15, 2011 Yes. Yes. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CM. Posted April 17, 2011 Share Posted April 17, 2011 See if you have a goals galore coupon on, and it's a cup tie, does the both teams to score only count after 90 minutes or does extra time count too? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Latino Lover Posted April 17, 2011 Share Posted April 17, 2011 It will just be 90 mins, extra time never really counts in anything other than to qualify markets or method of progression. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lerwick Lad Posted April 19, 2011 Share Posted April 19, 2011 Not sure if anyone else does this but if I am having a flutter on an in running football match i tend to always have the match odds up on screen. Occasionaly, I will be browsing other web pages. Is there a way of betfair making a noise to alert me the market has suspended? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fanny paddery Posted April 19, 2011 Author Share Posted April 19, 2011 Not sure if anyone else does this but if I am having a flutter on an in running football match i tend to always have the match odds up on screen. Occasionaly, I will be browsing other web pages. Is there a way of betfair making a noise to alert me the market has suspended? nope not as far as i know 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lerwick Lad Posted April 19, 2011 Share Posted April 19, 2011 thats what i thought fp. Would anyone else find it useful? Just wondering if I should email betfair with that request. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fanny paddery Posted April 20, 2011 Author Share Posted April 20, 2011 it is something that has been looked into as i have seen it discussed on the feedback community, however i have no idea why they are not going to implement it 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lerwick Lad Posted April 20, 2011 Share Posted April 20, 2011 cool, if you hear anything about it be sure to post it up mate. ta 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Latino Lover Posted April 20, 2011 Share Posted April 20, 2011 Bet 365 have sound effects for goals, whistles for pens, ht/ft etc which is quite useful. Anyway my question, does anyone else use the Betfair app? It used to work fine for me but now once I go to place a bet it shuts down so I've been using the betfair mobile site which isn't as good. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.