If its good enough for the bookies...
We all know that there are very few poor bookmakers yet we
continue to think that it is other people that make them rich
and that we can beat them. As you may have learned if you listen to people like Barry
Dennis or John McCririck on Channel 4, bookies make most of
their money by laying favourites. When a short priced
favourite loses, bookies make a lot of money. And this
happens a lot more than you might think.
Our Advantage
Unlike bookmakers you have
no obligation to lay every horse
no need to offer odds on every race
the ability to set your own stakes
no expensive overheads such as shops, web sites, and
staff.
This ability to be able to hand pick the horses you lay
means you can effectively just pick the cream of the
bookmakers business to focus on. This means you are in a better position than the
bookmakers & as we know, they have it pretty good.
Laying Favourites
Obviously focusing on shorter
priced favourites reduces the potential payout but how
exactly should you chose which horses to lay?
In determining a successful strategy for laying horses to
lose there are a number of questions:
Which races to choose?
Which horses to lay?
What prices to set?
Should you lay more than one horse?
Should you lay horses not to place?
The Answers
We were recently sent a book on this very subject.
The book, called "Losers
into Winners" is written by Raj Patel, who has been a
successful professional gambler for 7+ years and in recent
years, has been featured on TV a few times talking about how
he has taken advantage of the opportunities provided
by the betting exchanges.
The book is very readable and requires no previous
knowledge of form or internet betting, and indeed a fair
proportion of the book is focused on explaining the key form
elements and the mechanics of odd setting.
What we like about the book was its extensive use of real
life examples and case studies from flat and jumps racing to
fully explain the key concepts in finding the right horses to
lay. We also liked that the strategy was not
particularly complicated and did not require hours studying
the form. Essentially it just relied on a few basic
principles that created sufficient uncertainty about the
outcome of a race to make it attractive to lay a short priced
favourite.
Reading the book it brought home to me how the strategies
for finding a losing favourite are very different to those for
finding a winner. Rather than looking for a "dead
certs" you are looking for "high uncertainty". Know
how to quickly identify this is where the book added most
value for me.
The
Losers
into Winners book costs £67 for a download or £72 for a
hard cover. While there is quite a bit of content in it,
if you are familiar with form guides, betting and betting
exchanges this will save you some reading time. We read the book
and worked through the examples in about 2 hours.
Click
here for more information where you'll see the impressive results
they have got from this system. We're not usually a fan of systems
but there's something about lay betting and exchanges that does seem to
create opportunities to punters that makes this area an exception.
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