TheGro Blog

Up to recently I’ve done my betting the traditional way, either on Coupons from brick and mortar betting shops with mates at work, or online for my personal bets. With varied success its still fun on a saturday afternoon keeping track and monitoring your bets as the afternoon unfolds. But ultimately the bookie generally wins in the long run.

Then theres Betfair.

Ive had a Betfair account for a few years now, basically using it as you would a bookmakers website and not really dabbling in the trading side of the site (which is their bread and butter), until lately. Let me just state I’ve never been a huge gambler only the last few years have I regularly betted, it was about 2 years ago that I went into a bookmakers for the very first time so this in no way should be treated as a guide  or a how-to, I’m by no means an expert.

So what am I trading on?

Ive always liked the ‘Lay The Draw’ method on the football, whereby just before the game (or a few minutes in) I lay the draw, i.e. anything other than a draw wins. However, I like to exit the bet well before the end of the match with profit regardless of the result. This is accomplished by backing the draw after a goal has been scored because the odds generally go up after a goal goes in (unless a clear favourite scores first). Another small lay bet is placed again to hedge all the possibilities and you have a ‘green book’. All this can be done of course on the Betfair site, but the speed of money coming into the market can be a real nightmare to work out and place your bets accordingly. I have used Bettornado for iPad which works rather well (I’ve just noticed that this is now £9.99, it was free when I got it). Picking the right game to do this method is crucial as your first bet is a lay and makes your liable for a larger loss should the game end 0-0, and as the game progresses the odds are always moving against you. You do need an exit strategy should the game go against you in a 0-0 borefest, backing a small amount on the score being 0-0 should, depending on the game provide a safety net.

I am however looking at other ways of bagging some money as the above method works great should the match have goals but the liability is a little too big for what you can win for my liking, I had a bad experience with an Italian Serie A game last week, the statistics suggested a open and scoring game, it ended 0-0, I had to take a small loss on that, I managed to recover some of my cash, but it was a loss :(

I’ve been looking at Betangel software recently, and watching a lot of their videos on Betangel.tv and decided to take their free trial offer (I had to install bloody Windows on one of my macs to do this). This has proved quite profitable so far. Betangel can automate my Lay The Draw method, by automatically placing the initial lay bet and monitoring the market until conditions match my criteria and then place the reverse bets and hedge bets and exit with profit, again the game has to be the correct one, 0-0 is not your friend.

After that Italian set back I mentioned earlier, admittedly you can’t win all the time I started looking at ‘scalping’ the horse racing markets. I started off 2 weeks ago in Betangel’s practice mode to make sure the settings were correct and I was confident I could ‘read the market’ before using my own money. I set up Betangel to offset my initial bet by one tick, whether it be a back or a lay to automatically place a bet once the prices were, in the case of a lay, one tick higher than my lay price. The money you get is the difference between the two, and this can be done several times on each race before the off. As a result you have 2 choices you can have your bet in such a way that if one horse wins you win a decent amount and if that particular horse doesn’t win you don’t lose anything (yes thats right!) or you can ask Betangel to place a bet in such a way to spread the profit across all the horses in the race so whichever one wins you take a small profit. Remember you can do this more than once per race, and on a good day of racing there my be 5 or 6 meetings with 6 or 7 races on the card so the potential here is great, this works out well for me as I work nights so I have all afternoon to play about :)

Ive doubled my account balance last week playing for real money, and its all going quite well and I much prefer this method as its much less risky in my opinion, or maybe Im just better and doing it.

Im going to wrap this up now as the racing starts soon and I need to get ready, I’ll be back again in a few days and let you know how I’ve done.

Seeya.

C.