blue4578

One place (there are many) is: http://www.stats.betradar.com/statistics/betfaircom/?language=en Click on the country and league you require on the left hand menu, change the season via the main league table (unless you require this season) and then click Over/Under at the top. You can then choose 1.5, 2.5 or 3.5 goals (or 0.5, 1.5 and 2.5 for first/second half only) and it will give you the overall league percentage for Over/Under the total you've chosen, as well as the details for each individual team.

The best way to succeed is to be a market maker across many games, rather than picking one and putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have an edge, the variance in the results is much lower if you bet on more games and steady profit should follow.

What are you trying to achieve? If it's a pre-match trade, you're going about it the wrong way probably. In that case, by far the simplest way to do it is to pick one outcome and back or lay it now with a view to trading out later. Most of the time this would be trading the price of the favourite. You're looking for a price you can take now which you're sure is going to move one way or the other. On the other hand, if you're looking to be a market maker, or a backer and layer of all outcomes, then you're not going too far wrong. You're backing to 88% or so (I always back three outcomes in a football match between 88% and 89%) and you're laying about 110%. Those are reasonable percentages, although I think you've got the Stoke back and lay prices too far apart and the other two too close together. If I'm doing this, I will leave my prices in the market up until kick off, possibly tweaking them as time goes on. You're basically calculating the percentage chance of each outcome occurring, and building in a profit margin into this. Unless there's a lot of early action and the prices are all over the place leading to matching on both sides, I'll tend to stick the bets in there and let them ride. I tend to either end up laying the favourite and backing the draw OR backing the favourite and possibly laying the outsider as well. This comes about because most of the time I weight my prices so that I'm not laying the draw very often at all, if ever. My back and lay prices for the draw would be much further apart, with my back and lay prices for the favourite much closer together. If I were to be laying the favourite at 2.04, my back would be in at around 2.28 or 2.3. Not that I'm right of course, but it works for me. The stakes you can do what you like. My staking plan for this would be: Odds on favourite, back or lay £X whatever the price. ie If the price is 1.50, you're backing £X to win £0.5X, and you're laying £X for a liability of £0.5X to win £X. Odds between 2.00 and 3.00, back or lay for a liability/profit of £X Any price above 3.00, back it for level stakes of £0.5X, and lay it up to a liability of £X. The only exception being if I'm backing something over 10/1, I might cut the stake a bit. Therefore using the above staking plan, your maximum loss on any market would be £2X. Due to backing prices above 2/1 for level stakes, the potential maximum win would be higher than £2X. Apart from small bits and pieces early in the week, you don't usually get the back and lay prices matched on the same outcome. If you do, this is fantastic and is why bookmakers make so much money if idiots don't shop around for prices and take their poor prices with 110%+ margins. I will not trade out of any of these bets at the last minute as each one should be at good value if I've got my calculations right. That way I'll win some and lose some and won't be liable for as much premium charge in the long run. If I was trading out of markets and making a profit 90% of the time, I would be worse off regarding premium charge, Betfair/Betdaq points and commission rate and potential profit.

I'm not saying that you can't trade and make profit of course, but in a lot of situations it leaves you with a lot more work to do, requires much more concentration over a prolonged period and can often end in failure. If you're trying to trade larger sums on more obscure markets, it's impossible to do anyway unless you want to give money away. I must add that probably only about 5% of my total betting is on football these days. Home advantage in individual sports is largely not a factor as most tennis matches for example see two players from different countries playing in a third country. Different team sports have totally different trends regarding home advantage. Major League Baseball is an interesting case in point. It's a two-outcome sport, with the home win percentage unusually low for a team sport. This season is a bit strange as no team outside the NL Central (there are five other divisions) has a significantly better home record than away record. Yet if you go back to 2009, most of the better teams in the American League were dominant at home, with the third highest home win percentage in MLB history that season taking into account all teams. This wasn't good for me as I usually back outsiders playing away from home against short priced favourites due to the favourites often being overrated. It would be helpful if such trends stayed the same for years on end, but the fact that they don't at least keeps it interesting, if challenging to predict.

If all you bet on are Andy Murray matches at grand slams, then yes you can probably trade large amounts easily. Try doing the same on the early rounds of the Moselle Open this week. If people win on a market, there are other people who lose. People who say that you can't lose by trading are deluded, because if the market moves against you you end up losing. I've heard far too many people say that trading is some sort of no risk of losing enterprise when it's anything but. As for the other markets you mention, golf has virtually no liquidity on any markets except outright winner usually (The Ryder Cup will be an exception to this later this month). The NFL liquidity on Betfair has got worse over the years and for a lot of the games is actually better on Betdaq now. Football is OK for significant televised games, not so good for less high profile ones. Cricket again has good liquidity on live TV games, particularly internationals involving England, but just like golf the liquidity away from the match winner market is usually virtually non existent. I used to make a lot of money betting in-running on cricket on things like Over/Under batsman runs at bookmakers, but you just can't get bets on those markets these days. Of course if you're only betting the odd £10 or £20 here and there it's fine. If you're trying to lay off a £10,000 stake at sensible odds, there are relatively few markets where you can do this easily. Actually for betting in-running and getting great bets on at good odds, you actually want LESS liquidity because then you'll get people wanting a bet at any price who will take stupid odds. Obviously this only works up to a point, as you're never going to get people betting serious stakes at stupid odds usually (although it does happen occasionally), but if you want to lay an Even money shot at 1/2 in-running for £50, it's quite easy to do on illiquid markets if you put the effort in to follow them. Same theory also applies pre-match. If you are a layer in an illiquid market, you can make a lot of money by laying under the fair price. I remember laying teams at Evens who were 3/1 shots in League One maybe seven or eight years ago, at 2:55pm on a Saturday when there were no more layers in the markets and people just wanted a bet at Betfair. That sort of thing doesn't really happen pre-match any more, but it can easily happen in-running. As for happy trading, I don't. On at least 99% of occasions, I place my bets before an event starts and leave it at that.

If someone has a strategy that is so brilliant, why would they need to sell it? Even if it does work, then many people will have bought it and they'll all be trying to do the same thing, reducing any edge that may have been there in the first place. If you know what you're doing, and you think you know how to win, then do it. Much better than relying on someone else to do it for you.

There are arb alert services you can sign up to which will alert you to hundreds of arbs per day. Sadly you can't get away with arbing at online bookmakers anywhere near as much as you used to be able to 5-10 years ago. As for trading on Betfair, some people have this obsession where you have to trade out of a winning position to guarantee yourself a profit. Why? If you let everything ride, you will win some and lose some, but if the bets are good ones in the first place you will end up in front. I've had discussions with idiots who have argued till they're blue in the face that you can't win from betting unless you trade in-running. If you're betting £5,000 a go on Major Leauge Baseball for example, I'd like to see anyone try to trade out in-running at sensible prices because the liquidity on Betfair and other exchanges is virtually non-existent in-running and bookmakers that do offer it have tiny limits and massive margins. Not only that, but if you've several bets running at once, you have very little time to work out what's a fair price to lay, when betting pre-match you've all the time in the world to work out the probability of each outcome occurring. It's good that Betfair now offer pretty much everything in-running to give people the option to trade as an event progresses of course. They've been around since 2001 and for the first several years only a select few markets were in-running.

I'm not going to click on the link, but if you don't know what you're doing to start with, buying strategies is about as useful as buying a manual telling you how to perform brain surgery. There are plenty of internet forums and other sites where there is a wealth of free information about betting strategies. There are very few get rich quick strategies that can be acquired in such a way, particularly if your experience of betting and trading is limited. You have to do the hard work in working out how to win yourself.

Sorry not signed on here for about four months. Book will be available before the football season starts; will post up details when it's sorted.

About as surprising as Anne Keothavong failing to win the Australian Open. Murray only played the two Davis Cup ties last year as that was the minimum requirement to be eligible for the Olympics. Had been nearly two years since his previous appearance.

I've no idea, it was 2001 when I signed up. No doubt fanny paddery will be along with a Refer and Earn code for you shortly.

This appointment was rumoured last summer, I wonder why it took so long. I haven't come across anyone who thinks it's a bad idea for Murray, so let's see if it makes any difference. I don't think he'll win the Australian Open, but given Nadal's news I'm sure Murray will be hoping to be in his half of the draw rather than Djokovic's.

Same as a postponed game.

Generally, the Championship is good for draws. There are certain teams every season who draw as many as 19 or 20 games out of 46, yet you can still back them to draw @ 3.3 and bigger every game. You can get teams like that in any league, and it's usually the ones who are low-scoring, both in terms of scoring goals and conceding them. I don't follow any leagues other than the four English leagues down to League Two, so can't comment on the others. If you'd backed Liverpool to draw every time at home, you'd be massively in front this season. Looking at how they play, they are struggling to score goals against teams who come and sit with ten men behind the ball. I see no reason why this would change, so if you backed Liverpool to draw at home every time from now to the end of the season you would (probably) show a profit. Newcastle certainly have a chance to keep Liverpool at bay, so a draw there isn't the worst bet. I don't have a clue about Rangers v Motherwell.

Indeed. There are some things that I wouldn't even tell my granny let alone put in the public domain. Over the years I've noticed a couple of very small specific things, where basically if X, Y and Z are all true, then you can bet on A, B and C and make money. Nothing ever stays the same for that long, but if you are betting full-time, then some things become apparent. A good way to get started, particularly if you don't have any/many online betting accounts, is to take advantage of the bonus offers for new accounts, and place arbs in order to roll over the required stakes so that there in no risk of losing. You can then arb properly for a short while before the bookmakers are onto you. I made probably around £150,000-£200,000 from 2003-2006 by arbing and taking advantage of account opening offers and monthly online casino bonuses, which gave me the freedom to bet more seriously. The online casino bonus loophole has largely closed now, but you can still make money arbing if you know how. Bookmakers clamp down on it far more rapidly than they used to though. Sign up to one of the arb alert services ( http://rebelbetting.com is probably the best one) and you're in business. With the new account bonuses and a few arbs placed (placing "middles" on American sports or rugby handicap markets can see you hit the jackpot too, look it up) you could easily make £2,000 in a month or two, even if you were only starting off with maybe £200-£300. Timing it right is important. The best bookmaker offers every year tend to be during the week of the Cheltenham Festival. I think Ladbrokes last year for example were doing bet £100 and get a £200 free bet.

No. Sometimes big favourites are worth betting on to win. If they are worth opposing there will be value in the draw nearly every time. Look at Chelsea v Fulham, Arsenal v Wolves, Liverpool v Blackburn and West Brom v Man City just the past few days. Prices for these four were roughly 1/3, 1/4, 1/4 and 1/2 respectively. None of these teams won, but also none of them lost. All four games were draws. I layed Arsenal and Liverpool, and also backed the draw. I was a Manchester City backer; sadly you can't get them all correct. You're looking for a strategy that you can use without any thought or knowledge of the teams. I am aware of a couple of such strategies, but I wouldn't make them public. If you think that backing the draw when the favourite is a certain price or lower will yield a long-term profit, then it is easy to back test this over several years worth of results.

There is always a favourite, unless all three outcomes are 2/1, but even then that's three co-favourites? What I did say is that if you think that the favourite is under priced, then there will almost always be value in backing the draw. If you think about it, this is common sense. Some leagues have lower draw percentages and some teams don't draw very often. The leagues with low draw percentages are usually poor standard leagues with lots of goals. You'll find if you try laying all three outcomes to about 110% and backing all three outcome to about 88%-89% that when you've layed the favourite, more often than not you'll also end up backing the draw. Backing the draw blindly in every game wouldn't make a long-term profit unless you've got good reason to do so. It also probably would lose your money only very slowly, and would be less bad than backing every home or every away in most leagues. You're not really looking for strategies that show maybe a 5% loss long-term though.

Possibly some weeks if you shopped around for best price. How do you know that the draw is under priced?

Don't buy Betfair for Dummies, it's about as useful as a guide on how to put your socks on. Someone thought they were being kind when they bought it for me once (knowing what I do), but it couldn't be more useless even if you know nothing. Try The Definitive Guide to Betting Exchanges , which I also got as a gift and didn't need at all. I'm also going to have a book published about sports betting, probably within three months but certainly within six. I'll send you a free copy.

If you click on lay, the default price you're laying will be the one that's there already. Particularly several days beforw a game, make sure you're not laying something way higher than you should be. You can move this default price up and down as you please, and obviously you also need to set the amount. Some people use Betfair just like a normal bookmaker, taking whatever money is there at a given price at that time. You can also be a more traditional layer by putting money in the market and leaving it there for others to take. You shouldn't be attempting to lay all three prices unless you know what you're doing and what you're hoping to achieve. We were just talking about an old post of mine the other day, it doesn't mean it's right for everyone. There is no right and wrong strategy, lots of methods can make money and lots of them can be a disaster.

Best bookmaker by a country mile. High limits, best odds and they let you win without shutting you down. Pinnacle are the only bookmaker I actually use now, and if they weren't there I wouldn't have been able to do what I do for the past 8 years or so. If bookmakers were football teams, Pinnacle would be Barcelona and the likes of William Hill and Bet365 would be Plymouth and Dagenham and Redbridge. Everyone should have an account. The layout and the way they display their odds is a bit different to most, and they don't offer stuff like first goalscorer, correct score and so on (except for the biggest games), but they are excellent on what they do offer on football: Asian Handicap, match odds and totals. For American sports they are superb, and will take £20,000 bets without blinking.

Like I said, in the old days of hardly any layers in the Betfair markets, your strategy would've made you a handsome profit more than likely if you were doing it for all the lower league games for decent sums. These days you'd just get picked off by the major market moves, which are usually for good reason. Small sample size = large variance. You really need to test a strategy over hundreds, or preferably thousands, of bets before you can be sure of whether it's working properly. Obviously you can get a feel for things and sometimes it's obvious when something is working or it's not, but it probably was luck that you happened to win on those two weeks. Sometimes you get a lot of draws on a given weekend, sometimes you don't. From season to season, the draw percentage of a given league is usually fairly consistent.

Think of it like this: if you are laying one outcome, this is the same as backing all of the others. If you back one outcome (as most people do), you're effectively laying all of the other outcomes. Therefore laying is just a different way of doing pretty much the same thing. The key to betting is identifying the probability of something happening and then relating it to the odds, or creating your own odds. There are plenty of websites explaining things regarding betting strategies and how to go about certain things. The benefit of laying all three outcomes is that you don't have to think about anything other than "what's the probability of Team A winning, Team B winning or the game ending in a draw". That's all you should need to be doing when it comes to betting, but it makes it simple. You also don't have to think about which bets you're placing on a given day. The market, ie what other people are doing, decides it for you, and all you have to do is make sure your estimations of the probabilities of each outcome occurring are good, and then you just watch the money roll in if you do it right. In simple terms, you're just being a bookmaker because that's exactly what they do. Your advantage is that you don't have to price up every match or every team if you don't want to. You can have a 150% margin if you want as well.

Were you just looking at the bookmaker odds for League One and League Two and then just putting them into Betfair? I might have told this story before, but I'll tell it again anyway. I've met quite a few people at Betfair hospitality events, a lot of professional gamblers who all go about things in different ways. There is a group of four guys from Lancashire who do nothing but use bots to lay bookmakers' odds on Betfair, perhaps +/- a certain percentage. They make a lot of money, particularly in illquid markets, and obviously the key is to know which bookmakers are good with certain sports (not difficult if you follow the sports and their odds). Anyway, Centrebet were pricing up every single gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. This betting consortium decided they would lay the same odds on Betfair in all of the markets, which might have seemed a reasonable idea. A lot of these markets had little money in them, and these guys were probably the only significant layers. And they got absolutely murdered and lost tens of thousands, as did Centrebet probably. The problem being, with minority sports and leagues it isn't difficult for people to know more than you, or more than the bookmaker. In the lower leagues, things can move the prices which may not be immediately obvious. This would be a problem if you were leaving your odds up there and not using a bot to adjust them when the bookmakers adjusted theirs. To cut a long story short, offering bookmaker prices on League One and League Two would almost certainly lead to a long term loss, as the only bets you'd get matched (if you were laying with a profit margin built in) would likely be the ones where there is a major price crash for a good reason. I never ever leave anything in-play. If there's no goal, the draw price shortens and one or (more usually) both teams prices drift slightly. If you're backing and laying all three outcomes, it's likely you'd be laying the draw at far too high a price very often. In my experience, in most leagues (certainly the four English professional leagues) the draw is often over-priced slightly. Leaving it in-play obviously is also not an option in a lot of the lower league games, and if the match odds are unmanaged it's obviously suicidal. You're pricing matches up and considering the game as a whole. Obviously the probabilities are different as soon as it kicks off and time starts elapsing.