Im takings blue's advice and looking into setting up a betfair account.
Is there any tips or advice i should take?
Cheers

Good thread! I was also looking to get into betfair so i'll be keeping an eye on this!

It's a piece of piss and the only reason you'll use another betting site is to laugh at their pathetic prices.

Im with the "Dummies"

First all don't buy the book "Betfair for Dummies" , it's rubbish

Any specific questions?

What's your username and password?

Having gone through the tutorial i dont quite understand the staking in a lay bet.
Im a back bet you stake 10 pounds on the team 2 win i get that, however on a lay bet what is ur stake?
Eg if i wanted 2 lay a team who were avaliable to lay at 2.0 and i wanted to put 10 pounds on this what is the stake and what is the liability?

Just one .

Say you've taken Tottenham to beat Fulham, and with 20 minutes to go Spurs are 1-0 up. I've read people on here saying they've laid Spurs to guarantee a profit.

Would this mean sticking a bet on a draw or a Fulham win?

Decimals. 1.87 for example. Is that for every pound you put on you get 87p plus your pound back?

If a few of you are going to open accounts, you should use the Betfair Refer and Earn thing. If someone already with a Betfair account refers someone else, they get paid £20 when you've bet a certain amount, plus more if you end up betting a large sum over the first year.

If you're laying, you take the decimal price, say 2.0 then subtract 1 from it (so you've got 1.0). Then multiply this by the amount you're laying and this is your liability.

It would mean laying Spurs.

You could do, but it's far easier just to lay Spurs, which in effect is exactly the same thing but a lot easier to work out.

I presume to start laying is a bigger risk than to start backing teams?
In the case of your liability, does this means if the bet loses you owe the money to the person who offers the lay price?

Laying is as much of a risk as you want to make it.

For example you can lay Chelsea for tonight at 1.2 currently. Say you layed this to a stake of £10. Your liability would be 10 x (1.2-1) = £2. If they did not win, you'd win £10 (minus commission). If you're laying a bet, you're backing it not to win in effect, so you lose if it does win.

Obviously if you start doing things like for example waiting till Arsenal were 3-0 up last night and laying the draw @ 180 (as I did) the liability is far greater. I risked about £9000 to win an easy £50, but I would've lost my money in Wigan had come back to draw. There are some horror stories about people losing over £100,000 in one go trying to win £100.

I remember reading one of your previous posts where you said laying favourites is a good way to make money is this correct? For example i feel celtic being 1/5 tonight is a bit low !

Exactly. You can lay Celtic for £10 and then only lose £2 if they win.

Effectively for a football match, there are three outcomes. If you're laying one of the outcomes, you've got the other two on your side. Since Celtic are 1/5, you can basically get 5/1 on them not winning and so on. It really is pretty simple once you've done it a few times.

depends on the teams!

If you lay at 2/1 you can select how much stake you want to lay, so you could put up 10 @ 2/1 which would mean someone could come and bet £5 at 2/1 and your liability would be for the full £10.

Ok im beginning to get this, as for requesting odds if your backing or laying a team, if the odds are 1.50 and you request 1.51 are you likely to get it matched?

Whilst I realise there was virtually no chance of wigan getting back into it, surely that doesnt represent a 'value' bet?

You have lost me

Depends on where the market is moving, and how much money is being staked. It's more likely in a big televised game than say a 3rd division ruck.

sorry! not explaining it very well. listen to blue - he knows better.

my 1 tip would be when requesting odds that are greater than the current market odds you find that sometimes some of your stake gets matched, and Ive found betfair often goes a bit mad at this point. so be careful if this happens!

The best way to use betfair is horseracing. Generally you can back your horse and if its in with a shout in the closing stages you lay the horse at much shorter odds meaning that you are guarenteed to win.

An easy way to think off laying is essentially you are the bookie and people are betting with you??

That is one reason that I tend to get very, very good odds. Don't think of Betfair as just another bookmaker. I used to use Betfair that way, but a great feature is that you can post odds up at whatever price you like. Sometimes you get very silly bets taken, particularly in quiet, illiquid markets. Don't just automatically take the price on offer as the market can move, particularly if a game is several hours or even days away.



It did at the time, because Wigan weren't going to score 3 goals without reply in 20 minutes. I posted it up there as soon as it went 3-0 and within a minute the price had risen closer to 300/1. It's all about risk and reward. For example, when Arsenal went 2-0 up against Man Utd at the weekend, you could still lay Man Utd @ 29/1 to win the match. More time left and against a much better team but you still needed at least three goals without reply to beat you.

Alternatively, over £800,000 was matched on Arsenal against Tottenham @ 1.01 so it can go the other way.

I would rate myself as a highly intelligent person, however one thing i cant get my head around is odds as probabilities. I get it if theres only two outcomes i think but when (in football for examples) draws are involved i tend to get lost, would someone like to explain?

Aye you would ya arrogant b*st*rd

No one willing to help

What do you not understand?

If you take the odds in decimal form, you just find the reciprocal (one divided by the odds) to translate it to a probability. That's the same whether there are two outcomes, three outcomes in a football match or twenty outcomes in a horse race.

Working out what those probabilities should be is the hard part, as it isn't an exact science. Those who can do it well make money from betting, that that can't lose money.

Ok so odds of 6/4 on a team winning, goes that mean the team would be expected to win the game 2 out of 3 times ? (1/1.5 = 2/3)

6/4 = 2.5 in decimal form.

1/2.5 = 0.4 = 40% chance of winning.

You're only subtracting one when you want to find your liability when laying. You just find the reciprocal of the decimals odds to translate it to probabilities.


If you want to ignore that and think of the fractional odds and what it means, it's basically 6/4 against in old terms. Therefore 6 times it won't win and 4 times it will, thus it will win 4 times out of 10, which is 40%.

ahh i see now, i always took the 1 away which made things more complicated, so if teams are evens there is a 1 in 2 chance they will win and so on. Should i ask how you go about making your own odds or is it just an experience thing. I never really make my own but i can spot when i think teams are over or underpriced, ie celtic tonight !

6/4 means that a team should win 4 times and not win 6 times if the game was played 10 times.

Divide the [bottom number] by the [bottom number + top number] to get the "probability" -

Odds of 6/4 = 4/(4+6) = 0.4

Similarly, odds of 4/6 = 6 / (6+4) = 0.6

Odds of evens (1/1) = (1/1+1) = 0.5 and so on...

Edit: I see Blue4578 has done a better job of answering it.

There are a million different ways to go about it, read the P&B University thread as there is some useful stuff on there. That's the key to winning at betting, knowing what the true chance of something happening is. It can never be an exact science (unless you're rolling dice or tossing coins) which is what makes it interesting.

If you think Celtic @ 1.2 is too low then you're half way there. You then just need to work out how likely are Celtic to win? 1.2 implies a 5 in 6 chance of winning, or 83.33%. So you're obviously saying that their true chance of winning is less than 83.33%, hence the odds should be higher. All you need to do is put a figure on it, as well as the chances of it being a draw. Then the other outcome takes care of itself as the three probabilities add up to 100%, and you've got yourself some odds.

Ok so say i think celtic will win 7 out of 10 times 2 draws and 1 killie win
so this gives odds of 7/17 4/1 9/1

Am i right?

You would give odds of 3/7, 4/1 & 9/1

oh aye

Always take commission into account when assessing how good odds are compared to other bookies/betting exchanges.

If you want to put £400 on a team x, and at the bookies they are 6/4, and on betfair they are 2.54, the odds on Betfair look better(and they are), but after commission deductions your profit at betfair would be £585.20, but would be £600 at the bookies.

If your commission is 5% those numbers are correct, but you can have as low as 2% commission.

Plus you have the option to trade in running, you only pay commission on your net profit on each market.

My commission has stayed at 5%, although I only don't use betfair too often. What are the cutoff points for commission falling? 80% of my bets are on Scottish 3rd div games, so I don't regularly bet in play and I never realised that you only pay commission on the net profit of the market, not each bet.

They changed the commission structure early last year, moving the top threshold up from 100,000 points to 150,000 and making the increments smallers. You can check the site yourself for how many points you need to get lower commission, but I know you need at least 1,000 points for it to go lower than 5% .

You need to be winning and losing a total of at least £112,500 per week to maintain 2% commission with the 15% decay of your commission points every week, so that's probably out of reach for most people.

Does commission get taking off every bet you back or lay and who gets the comission?

Betfair take it off your profit. That's how they make their money: provide a forum for punters to exchange bets with each other and then take commission for doing so.

You only pay commission on a winning bet of course, and as I was saying earlier it's only on the net profit you make on a particular market. You earn 1 commission point for every 10p of commission you pay on winning bets and implied commission you would've paid on losing bets. You lose 15% of your points each Sunday at midnight. The amount of commission you pay the following week depends upon how many points you have before your points decay the previous Sunday at midnight. All this is covered in more detail on their website.

As an example, I played about with the Arsenal v Wigan match odds market last night because I guessed that Arsenal's odds would rise when they announced their lineup. I was laying Arsenal in the low to mid 1.7's for quite a lot of money, as I was planning to back it at a higher price later on. Their price rose to about 1.96 in the leadup to kick off. I backed Arsenal in the low 1.9's after laying them a lot lower. I probably layed about £50,000 and backed about the same at various prices. However, despite the size of these bets, as the game kicked off my position was approximately Arsenal +500, The Draw or Wigan +8500 . I'd placed a lot of bets and because the market moved the way I expected it to, I had an assured profit before it started. I had weighted it heavily against Arsenal winning, but then fortunately managed to switch it so that I won slightly more if Arsenal won after they started the game really well. I got lucky that they didn't score before I switched the bet. I won about £5500 on the market in the end, although I placed over £100,000 worth of bets. The commission was 2% of my net winnings and not 2% calculated on every individual bet I placed.

That's obscene

No it's not, it's the future.

Good wee thread this, I have a feeling it will probably get more posts than the Equine Extravaganza.

Funny you mention about your trades on Arsenal v Wigan, as I was having a good look at the breakdown on bets on it and there were two big matches at the 1.71 and 1.94ish odds, i wondered if you had anything to do with them.

Probably some of that at 1.71 yeah, although I settled for backing them mostly 1.9-1.92 as I didn't think it would reach as high as it did.

Trading large sums anticipating a price movement is something I tend to do quite often on Premiership games or other significant cup ties only. You can't get the money traded on anything else. That one last night was absolutely perfect as I pretty much knew what Arsenal's lineup would be and how the market would react when it was announced. Even if Wenger had had a change of heart and named maybe a few people like Diaby or Nasri in the lineup, the price wouldn't have been less than 1.71. As it was, Arsenal had so many injuries as well as van Persie suspended, they couldn't risk any of their regular players. I just don't quite see how others didn't see that

I think people are beginning to cotton on to the fact that the odds first produced on a Monday or Tuesday for Scottish 3rd division games leave some teams odds a good few percent higher than they should be. Because of my excellent knowledge of the division, and reasonable nack for being able to assemble my own 'true' odds for the game it's quite easy to pinpoint the descrepancies and take advantage of it.

It might just be that I'm only just noticing it, but I think that odds are slashed much more on 3rd div odds than they ever were before because people are recognising the good value they offer.

In the last few weeks I've pinpointed several games and the odds have been cut as I predicted. If I had the money I could back the team on Tuesday, and lay them off on the Saturday at lower odds and make a profit, but because the amounts I bet are not in the several thousands bracket profit would be minimal. I'm still quite pleased I have the concept and thinking behind it right though.

That's very true. Skybet and Bet365 for years have been early with their Scottish lower league odds, and I'm sure that other bookmakers do the same now. I never look any more but Skybet used to bring theirs out on a Monday morning. I can't get a bet of any size on with either bookmaker so I've given up completely on the Scottish lower leagues, but if you're betting under £100 per time and can identify the value you can make a killing.

If you can identify which way a market is going to move, you can make a lot of money before the game even starts. However, it's only really the Premier League where you can get very large sums staked, and that's the hardest league to do it on. You can do it on a smaller scale for other lower leagues of course.

One of my lungs collapsed reading that.

I've just recently joined betfair and only placed two bets, both to win. One up, one down. I still can't work out the matched/unmatched part of it. And the figure underneath the bet price(£1317 in the tutorial) is that the amount of money that has been staked so far at that price?

Something I also didn't realise before, if you like doing multiple bets, acca etc, then betfair is not for you.