Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a losing betting strategy and miraculously turn it into a winning one?
Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We will take a strategy that only has a 25% win rate into a strategy that wins 95% of the time. We will do this by taking a traditional Tennis betting strategy and turn it into a Betfair trading strategy.
Laying favourites in Tennis matches
The strategy we’re going to use here is quite simple to understand. We will lay the favourites in Tennis matches.
One of the things that we will do slightly differently, which will significantly improve your betting, is that we lay each favourite to a £10 liability. This was we know our worst loss is going to be £10 per match regardless of whatever the odds are on the favourite. The benefit of that, is while you limit your liability, you still have the potential profit many times that potential loss.
It’s generally considered that the betting markets are pretty efficient, so what happened on this occasion?
If we look at the stats, we can see that of those 20 matches, only a small number of the outsiders went on to win, just 25% of those matches. 75% of the time the favourite won.
However you can see that we’ve actually lost a relatively small amount of money, just £5 overall. We have risked £200 across those 20 matches and actually only lost £5 pounds. So your objective to get profitable is to find a way to overcome that £5 loss at the end of these 20 events.
Why Trading Tennis will help you win more often
The problem with traditional betting, is that it simply comes down to what happens at the end of the match as to whether you win or lose money.
But of course, using a betting exchange, we can actually take advantage of the fact that you can bet in-play and cash out at any point. That now produces all sorts of opportunities because we’ve already fixed our loss, but the potential profit is still there for the entire match.
When you look at a graph of a Tennis match you will often see the odds, excuse the pun, swing one way and then back again. That means that over the course of the match, you will get an opportunity to cash out for a profit several times. This will turn that potential loss into a profit. If you just placed a bet and let it run to the end of the match, that doesn’t happen.
Betting is outcome dependant, you win on the final result. But with a Betfair trading strategy, you can win regardless of the final outcome of a match.
To simply the concept. Think of it like betting on heads or tails on a coin toss. Whereas trading is betting on if the coin shows heads or tails more than once when it’s spinning. By the time the coin has landed you have already won your bet.
In this example of 20 matches. 19 out of 20 matches would have given you the chance to trade out at a profit at some particular point within the match.
You need to decide when that point will be, but most Tennis trader woulud trade out when a player is a break or set up within the match. Essentially where the favourite is losing, albeit temporarilty. That will give you the ability to be able to actively cash out and generate a profit.
In this case, if you’d caught the market at the maximum point of potential profit within all of those 20 matches, you could have cashed out for £300. So for a £10 liability, your potential return was £300 pounds. Of course, it’s impossible to cash out at the perfect point in a match, so £300 is an unrealistic target.
But that’s the potential cash out value that you have to play with and in fact you are only trying to cover a £5 loss. That was how much we lost just by betting without any skill. It’s small barrier to overcome to get profitable in this manner.
Summary
If we go into a market and we bet at random, we’ll get some pretty random results. We decided to lay to a £10 liability just to see what happened. Over 20 matches we lost a small amount of money, and that defined what we needed to do to be profitable.
The way we became profitable was that we looked for an opportunity during the in-play period where we can actually cash out for a profit. If we cashed out at the best point within each of these matches, that gave us a potential profit of £300 if we were perfect, but we know that that’s impossible. But nonetheless, all we needed to do was to capture a tiny sliver of that potential profit to overcome the loss that we made when just betting.
That’s how you turn a profit from a strategy that is unprofitable if we are doing just standard betting. Furthermore, we didn’t use any particular insight or knowledge to do this. We just took advantage of the characteristics of the way Tennis odds move in-play.
If you adopt the same approach, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do it, as well. Applying a bit of Tennis knowledge will help you maximise this strategy even further.
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