Betfair Trading Strategy: Bet Sleep Bet

Recently i've been experimenting with a new method of horse race trading that i would like to share with you. It involves gathering all of the views of tipsters from local newspapers (this can be done online) and then backing firm favourites (horses which have most of the tipsters recommending them) the night before the race. The reason i've called it "Bet-Sleep-Bet" is simply because that's what this strategy involves. You look for horses to bet on, sleep, then wake up the next morning to close your positions.

The idea is that the price will go down as more people will buy newspapers the next morning and bet using the tipsters' recommendations. Since we've already got in at a high price, we can lay the prices for a guaranteed profit. The prices will lower due to the supply and demand theory – the more people who want to back will reduce the amount of money available on the back column of Betfair and reduce the odds of an event.

The first stage is to find the horses to bet on. We know that more than 80% of punters base their bets on newspaper tipsters. The aim here is to exploit this knowledge by backing horses at a high price before they do AND laying our bets off to GUARANTEE a profit regardless of the outcome of the event.

The night before the race at around 9pm , Go to http://www.RacingPost.co.uk and click on “Main Site”. You'll need to sign up to access the information we need, it's free and takes two minutes at most. After you have logged in, click on “Cards” on the left menu and select a date. This should bring up a list of races on that particular day. Select any race (even if it's not the one you want to bet on) and then find the race  you want to bet on by using the drop down menu on the top of page:

You'll have to go through all the races for that day and find horses which have 5 or more tipsters tipping them AND there are no more than 3 other horses being tipped in the same race. You should find around 4 or 5 horses which meet these criteria every night.

To see the newspaper tipster selections, scroll down and click on "selections" tab below the text about "spotlight verdict". Here is an example of a race we found that met these criteria:

As you can see, Rose Bien would be a perfect horse to back and lay in the morning because there are so many newspaper tipsters tipping them. The Sun, Daily Mail and The Star are all very popular UK newspapers which are read by the majority of the population. This is a good indication that punters will blindly back at Betfair, thus sending the price of Rose Bien crashing lower.

After you have placed a back bet on Betfair, place an unmatched Lay bet about 0.2 lower than my back bet which will guarantee a profit if both bets are matched. To work out your lay stake, use the calculator here (remember to enter 5% commission for Betfair when calculating stakes)

In most cases, i wake up the next morning to find that both bets have been matched and i have guaranteed a profit. If a bet has not been matched or moves the wrong way, i'd fix the bet to guarantee a small loss or a smaller profit. To prove that this method works, here is what happened the next morning with the example we used:

From the example above, we can see that i managed to back at 3.5 and then lay at 2.92 to guarantee a small "stress-free" profit.

This method has been working well so far but i am still optimising the strategy to decrease losses. I'll be updating and adding to this tutorial as soon as i modify my trading strategy. This method can also be used with Football / Soccer.