Guide Nr. 1 - Trading with Betfair Essentials - Back and Lay

I will start from today a series of articles regarding Betfair trading. After searching around for something like this online I saw that many guides are very difficult to follow by a newbie in trading.

Many people are now discovering Betfair Trading and I think you should be taking an interest in it as well. If you are already a Betfair user then you might already be familiar with this style of betting. Apart from backing and laying odds, you are able to "trade" them.

Don’t have an account at Betfair yet? Make one by clicking the banner below and you will get a free 25 pounds bet (30 euro).

The main attraction to Betfair Trading is the ability to guarantee a profit on an event regardless of the outcome. This means that no matter who wins the event, you can generate a profit.

To do this, you will either have to back odds then lay them for lower or lay and then back at a higher price to guarantee a profit. The main principal here is to "Back High - Lay Low". It doesn't matter which one you do first.

This is where many people find it difficult to understand trading. What does backing and laying mean?

So, for this we will take an example from a tennis match today. I find tennis matches the best when it comes to trading so my examples will be based on them, but you could always do this for football matches, the rules are the same.

We have today:

We have two columns, Back and Lay. Don’t be confused that there are lots of odds out there. Let’s see the back column. Back means that we make a bet for an outcome to happen. So we have 2.82 for Gil to win the match, 1.54 for Monfils to win the match. Under the odds it is the sum of money available for that odds. That means that you can only bet 7 euro at 2.82 for your bet to be taken instantly and 322 euro at 1.54 on Monfils. If you would like to bet more, you would have to do with lower odds (2.8 and 1.53), or have to wait till someone buys the odds. What does this mean?

Quite simple, bet 1000 now at 2.82 you will immediately take those 7 euros and the rest of 993 you will see moved on the lay column. They will be matched when someone makes a bet @ 2.82 that Gil will not win the game.

You will find trading much easier if you use what is known as an API application. This is a piece of software that replaces the Betfair website and makes placing bets easier and quicker. They also usually have many extra functions that may not be available on the Betfair website such as:

• Automatic hedging - spreading the profit or loss across all outcomes
• Stop Loss - limiting your losses to a set amount
• Single click bet placement
• Constant updating of the market prices

I use and have used several applications: The Geeks Toy and Fairbot being two of the most useful I have found. The Geeks Toy is the one I use even now as it is one of the fastest on the market and it is also free.

So, let’s take for trading’s sake an example. We will make up a story of what will happen in the game. Maybe, like me, there are other who think odds on Gil are value because Monfils still tries to find it’s fitness and didn’t make a good game with Traver yesterday. We back Gil @ 2.86 (the odds available now) with 1000 Euro.

So under Frederico Gil we have the sum we would win if we leave the bet like that until the end. On Monfils it’s the sum we will lose if Monfils wins the game. Let’s say that Gil will break Monfils fast. The odds will drop around 1.8-1.9 for Gil. By then you have 2 options.

• Sell the bet to make profit regardless of the outcome (here you can let the profit on Gil or spread the profit on the two tennis players)
• Risk and leave the bet until the end of the set when if Gil takes it the odds should be around 1.5 for him and you would have more profit secured but more pressure on your shoulders J

Let’s take the 1^st option to show you the two possible outcomes:

1. So we backed Gil @ 2.86. Now we will lay him @ 1.85, that meaning that we sell the bet.

So we have layed the same sum of money on Gil and now the left part will look like this:

That means that we win 959 Euro if Gil wins the game or we would lose nothing if Monfils wins.

     2. Second option is to spread the profit. Click on the lay odds @ 1.85 and just find the right sum to spread the profit equally on both players. In our case it should look like this:

So we have our backer’s stake with 1546 Euro that should mean that the left side will look like this:

That means that we win 518 Euro regardless of the outcome of the game so we can sit back and relax and watch the game.

Why do I use software for trading? All the things I told you above could be made by a click of a button (the bets, the spreading). The software will do all the mathematics for you so you will not lose time. Time is precious in live trading!

This concludes the first tutorial about trading at Betfair! If you have any other questions please write to me at admin@betting-rss.com