When laying horses to lose became widely available with the emergence of Betfair, there was a huge amount of excitement over the ease at which you could now “play the bookmaker”. Everyone knows the bookmaker always wins in the long-term don’t they?, so making money laying horses is surely going to be like taking candy from a baby, isn’t it?

As we all know, that’s not quite how things panned out. Many people dived in trying to lay the outsiders knowing that the winner of any race in the majority of cases may come from one of the first 3 in the market. The trouble with this is it’s this end of the market that the Betfair odds diverge most from the true prices, the real 10/1 shot can be available to lay at 13 or more on the exchanges, the 15/1 at 20 plus the 50/1 at 100 plus. The problem being that whilst it is fairly easy to have a long run of successful lays, lulling the unwary into a false sense of security, when the winners do come in, and they will, they are at odds that will wipe out your bank in one fell swoop.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, at the other end of the market, among the front runners where prices are much closer to the true odds, finding the over-bet favourite, or picking the “value” lays in the same way you would look for a value horse to back, can pay dividends. Irrespective of this, laying on betfair should always be in the back of your mind as a tool to increase or lock in profits. The following are just three of the common ways we exploit laying horses within the Betting Service on a daily basis:

Laying in running

The ability to bet in-play gives us ample opportunity to exploit the “lemming” effect. Most notably we are using this to great effect on the “Hughie” place bets. Given that they are solid place bets, profitable in their own right, more often than not the prices will shorten dramatically in-running giving us the opportunity to lay off our original bet and lock in a guaranteed profit.

Laying the field

There is obviously (usually) only going to be one winner in a race, but in the races most likely to be closely fought in the latter stages, the odds can shorten and lengthen over several horses in the space of a few strides. We can look to capitalise on this and attempt to lay multiple horses at low liability during the course of the race, such that if 2 or more are matched we are guaranteed profits.

Trading

Obviously, the ability to lay a horse gives us an opportunity for out and out trading, backing high and laying low for guaranteed profits. Whether this is in the frantic pre-race market, during the race or at a more leisurely pace on any potential steamers or drifters spotted as the markets form, there are multiple opportunities to trade for profit.

These approaches can be equally applied to almost all sports and betting markets, so to those armed with the right mindset and approach, as discussed in a previous article, laying should be a profitable weapon in your betting armoury.

Whatever sport you follow for your betting, horse racing, soccer, tennis etc, making the following mistakes could be costing you dearly. Whatever betting systems or method you apply and whether you choose to bet or trade the sports on a betting exchange or online bookmaker is irrelevant. If you are making any of these mistakes you could easily turn the most statistically profitable sports betting system into a long-term loser. These are 3 areas that the “Professional” gambler will have mastered:

Mistake 1 – Discipline

Let’s get this right out into the open now; gambling for many is an addiction. There are numerous physiological reasons for this, connected with the production of dopamine within the brain associated with the euphoric feeling created by winning. This article is not intended to discuss this in any detail, but suffice to say that this is what the bookmakers feed off for their profits. The problem is that this dangerous cocktail of betting and dopamine will lead the undisciplined gambler to force bets when they know, deep down, that the criteria for there method is not fully met or that the odds are not in their favour. This lack of discipline in betting can be further magnified after losses have occurred and lead to a spiral of bets, chasing the losses until the amounts required to recover become insurmountable. The professional gambler will always apply a level-headed and disciplined approach.

Mistake 2 – Not Keeping Records

In order to be successful, irrespective of the betting systems or methods you use and whether you use an online sports book or your local bookmaker, the professionals will keep records of all the bets they have placed, effectively keeping a “profit and loss” account of their transactions as any well-run business should. Without this it is all too easy to conveniently forget the large losing bets, or conversely focus only on these, forgetting the regular winners. Accurate record keeping not only serves to confirm that the long-term profitability of your betting business is on course, but gives you the ability to remind yourself of the overall performance which can be invaluable in riding out the inevitable losing runs.

Mistake 3 – The Butterfly Effect

As a consequence of the above mistakes, a third classic error leading to a failure to profit from betting is what I term the “Butterfly Effect”. The lack of discipline and accurate record keeping, combined with the disappointment of not seeing instant massive financial rewards causes the losing gambler to flit regularly from service to service or method to method in a vain attempt to find the “Holy Grail”. For many that holy grail has always been in front of them, hidden in plain sight, but without employing the correct psychological and business like approaches most gamblers will carry on looking for the next best thing having unknowingly allowed the real opportunities to profit pass them by.

I hope this goes some way to further explaining the reasoning behind our philosophy that “Betting is a business, gambling is for idiots”, the cornerstone behind Big Mikes successful Strategic Betting approach