2nd November 2015

Hi ,

The concept I'm going to talk about today is a method that you can use to highlight favourites to lay.

I originally created this approach to solve a question that was sent in.

The method that I’m about to describe should not be used on its own. It should be used in conjunction with your own analysis. However if you have a favourite you think could be a good lay, this method will help to confirm your suspicions.

In order to use this method you’ll need to be available to look at the Betfair market during the racing day.

Go to the race you're interested in and you'll see a screen similar to the one below. Please note that you should be doing this as close to race time as possible, ideally just a few minutes before, but due to having to take screen shots I am doing it well in advance of the race which means that the markets are not completely formed.

At the time of writing I’m using the old version of Betfair for these screenshots because the new one has a bug that prevents the information that we need from displaying. However they are aware of this may be fixed by the time you read this.

Find the favourite and click on the little graph icon on the left hand side of the horses name, as shown above. This will open a popup window on your screen like the one below.

What we are interested in is the Total Matched On This Event and Betting Summary – Volume.

The current back odds of Goldstorm are 2.46 and we’re going to work out what the odds should be based on the amount of money bet on this runner. To do this we do the simple sum…

Betting Summary – Volume divided by Total Matched On This Event

23,311 / 45,185 = 0.52

We then turn the result of this sum into odds by doing…

1 / 0.52 = 1.92

You can see that based on the current money being bet into the market this runner should actually be 1.92 although the odds on offer are 2.46.

Pretty good value at the moment, although this may change closer to race time which is why the closer to the offer you do this the better.

Finally we want to find out what the disparity is.

The disparity the difference between the odds we have calculated and the odds on offer.

To get this we take the odds on offer and divide it by the odds we calculated...

2.46 / 1.92 = 1.28

Anything above one indicates how much better the odds on offer are than what we calculated and anything lower than one indicates how much worse the odds on offer are. It doesn’t matter which way this goes but what we are looking for is for this number to be 1.30 or higher, or 0.70 or lower.

If the horse is favourite and meets this criteria, these runners have proven to be very bad value back bets.

What this means for us is that if our own research indicates this horse may be a good lay we now have excellent confirmation that this is a good lay bet. Alternatively if we have another runner in the race that we feel is stronger we can bet on this runner to win with more confidence.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is designed to be used in conjunction with your other form reading methods but if you do it will become a powerful part of deciding whether to place a bet on the favourite or not.

Back next Monday.

Michael Wilding