All punters would like to make a profit from gambling, and with the betting exchanges now a part of the normal betting world it is essential to have an account with at least one of them.
A simple way of showing the profit potential of an exchange is to compare a horse racing system that breaks even or shows a small loss using bookmaker SP, but using BSP (Betfair Starting Price) it shows a profit. You can clearly see this in the example below from real results during 2011.
|
Year |
Runners |
Win |
SR |
P/L Exc |
ROI Exc |
P/L SP |
ROI SP |
|
2011 |
1187 |
482 |
40.61 |
39.25 |
3.31 |
-14.72 |
-1.24 |
You can see this system would show a profit of £39.25 in 2011 (5% deductions included), while using a normal bookmaker you would have shown a loss of £14.72, ouch!! The difference is a whopping £55, and this is just to £1 stakes. This is why using Betfair is a MUST.
One thing that using an exchange means is that some systems that worked way back in the 90′s but stopped due to overuse may now again be profitable, so it may be worth searching the internet for old free systems and checking them on the likes of Raceform, Proform or Horseracebase to see if they are now profitable. Some stats sites don’t have BSP so just add 10% to SP as you should average 8%-12% better than SP on an exchange.
If you are already using a profitable system backing at SP then you are losing profits by not backing the horses on the betting exchanges.
Another way of profiting on the exchanges is to LAY horses, that is backing the horse not to win. It’s easy to find a losing horse but it is actually more difficult to profit from laying than it is compared to win betting. This is because the lay bet has to include the overbet, that’s the 8%-12% bonus win backers get.
One line of ‘gambling’ the betting exchanged opened up is trading. This basically means buying and selling the actual Betfair prices to lock in a profit. This is usually done before the race is off, so you may back a horse at 4.0 in the belief the price will drop, and then lay at 3.8 for the same stake which producse a profit on that horse. You can then do what we call ‘greening up’ which splits that profit between all runners so no matter what wins you profit. Simple and easy money? Not quite, many people fail by not bailing out when the price movement goes against you, it is controlling the bailout that usually determines whether you make long term profits or not.
One good thing with trading is that you can use high stakes with little risk. A £100 stakes may only risk less than 5% of it at anyone time, especially if you are only dealing with 1 or 2 ticks.
One further form of profiting on an exchange is to use Back to Lay (Lay to Back is best ignored when starting out). You find a horse that always runs well in a race and expect the price to drop in-running, so you back the horse before the race and lay it in-running, greening up to lock in a profit on all runners. However this is more risky, if the horse falls before you bail out then you lose 100% of the stake, but you do make more profit than just trading the odd tick before the race.
So as you can see, having an exchange account is essential, not only for better odds but also to give you many more options on the types of bets you can do.