The Footy Trader

I am pleased to announce the latest in my series of Podcasts – Wizardcast 33. In this one I talk about matched betting. I give tips and hints on how to get started doing matched betting.

There are Free bet available on the Online Bookmaker sites and all you have to do is to know how to lay the bets off so that you can claim the money Risk Free.

The bookmakers don’t mind because they keep on giving free bets to get new customers and they add Terms and Conditions to make sure they are not abused. In fact for us if all goes well they bookmaker ends up with money in the pocket they wouldn’t have had otherwise because what we want is for lay bet to succeed at Betfair rather than to win at the bookie and have to withdraw from our bookmaker account.

You can use software to do this or you can work direct on the Betfair site. I can recommend BetAngel, BinarySoft BDI and BetIE very highly. Each have strengths and unique points to appeal to different types of Betfair traders.

Please head on over to iTunes to add a comment about the podcast and go to Digg and any other places to add Wizardgold Blog and podcast.

Thank you my loyal listeners. I just checked my stats with Libsyn which provides the bandwidth for the Podcast and my podcasts have been downloaded over 27 thousand times in all. Sweet !!

Tags: Podcast, Wizardcast, Wizardgold, matched betting, free bets, Betfair, betting exchange, Betdaq,

The plan of action will be to trade the under 2.5 goals market and also to set up a dutch on the correct score. Newcastle will be looking to get a win under the hand of Kevin Keegan. Not turning out the hero he was expected to be for the Toon Army. Newcastle have lost the last 4 away games and have not won for some time, 12 games to be exact. The scoreline forecast on Soccerstats.com is for over 2.5 goals.

Birmingham need a win  due to being a bit close to the relegation zone but Newcastle are only 2 places above I expect it will be a hard fought game.

Here is the screenshot of the correct score dutch first.

Here is the screenshot of the Match Odds dutched  for a home win and a draw. I have set this up in Learning mode  in BetIE so that I can try it out without risking the betting bank.

I have made my choices early for tomorrow, basically I was looking for games where there were odds that were close enough. The plan is to back bet on Betdaq and lay off on Betfair. I have gone for games that are earlier in the evening and that might leave it that I can do more later in the evening, the Spanish games are always on later than anything else.

I went for a back bet on Marseille at odds of 3.55 who are playing in Russia against Zenit. I laid it off on Betfair for odds of 3.60 I used stakes of €30 on both sides of the position.

I put another bet on a different game so that all the eggs are not in one basket. I used the under/ over2,5 goals market with the Hamburg vs Bayer Leverkusen. Over all I will have a loss on the 2 games of about €1.75. But I will have a free bet of the equivalent of £25 on Betdaq. Have been meaning to get a Betdaq account running for a while to have a choice of odds for the trading on the under 2.5 goals markets. I got back odds of 2.21 on Betdaq on the overs with a bet of €5 and lay odds of 2.3 on Betfair with a stake of €4.89.

In the Terms and conditions it says that the account will be credited within 72 hours. Hopefully it will be sooner than that so I can do some more trading, also the bets have to be placed on odds of 2.0 or over.

I got the game 5 minutes late but thought I would give it a go anyway and wouldn’t you know it the market suspended before the price had a chance to move much. Decided to put in another buy at the new odds so that I would move to a profit quicker so long as no more goals went in. I just left it then and was able to trade out about 15 20 mins later to a small profit. The second goal went in at sixty minutes and I have just spotted that Liverpool have scored again. Gerards complaints about how well they have been playing lately seems to have had a positive effect on the team.

I used BinarySoft for trading today. I only have a small betting bank so I started with a 0.2 size of a back or buy to start the position on the under 2.5 goals and I put in the same again just after the first goal. It didn’t take too long to be able to trade out for a small profit despite the goal going in at 12 minutes. I would have preferred to have got in at the start of the game and take the couple of ticks movement an be greened up at 10 minutes.

As I was writing this another goal went in, this time one for Bolton, but it will be a little late with only 10 minutes left to the end of the game.

I set up some dutches for the correct scores using BetIE yesterday and got it right with all eight games that were being played I put 100 euro on each bet and the profit at the end of the was 208 euro. From my spreadsheet I have set up to record these type of bets I have profit of 561 euro from 25 games.

To set up those types of dutching bets you have to use BetIE or the BetAngel Professional You can also do the dutching in Soccer Mystic. But I didn’t have Windows running on my Mac and didn’t want to start it either so I stayed with BinarySoft which was great for what I was doing.

Might trade on the Everton Portsmouth game which starts in half an hour too.

By the way I am not pleased with Betfair regards the way they want to charge more if you have more than 20 data request per second. It will mean that I will perhaps only be able to run one piece of software at one time so as not to get charged more, or I will have to limit the number of markets monitored in BinarySoft.

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Last night I traded on the unders on Betfair in the Champions league and I recorded some of the action. I should have recorded more but I was just busy concentrating on making money. Before the games started I have greened up halfway to the 1% profit target for the day. When the games started I put in more trades and let them green up too. I made about 2.5% in the end and I was able to add a little to that total by putting in a late bet on the under 2.5 goals at about 83 minutes on the Arsenal game which was at nil nil, and stayed that way to the end. I traded on all of the games and made varying amounts. The game with less liquidity was the Sevilla game so I traded less on that one.

The way I worked it was to trade at the begining of the game and have my 1% profit in the bag, then add to it after a goal was scored. Fortunately the second goal in the Celtic vs Barcelona game was very quick and so I didn’t get caught out by it. I like to move to the under 3.5 goals to do the next trade if there is enough money on the market, nice to have a couple of goals safety for the trading. It is great to be able to set up trades on all 4 games and see them in the monitored markets list with the latest odds displayed along with all the other necessary information, like Last traded price, net position, whether I have unmatched bets and the current profit or loss.

I will be editing the recording of BinarySoft BDI that I made with live bets Thursday late in the day or on Friday as I have decided to go to Barcelona for the day. I don’t go there too often as I am not keen on big cities too much. But there is an art shop I want to visit and also a book shop, I am keen to buy myself a couple of good sketch books, and get back into drawing again. It has been too long since I was drawing things that’s for sure.

Even though I like BinarySoft BDI I still use BetAngel because it is the professionals choice if you want to do more than trade with a ladder interface. In BetAngel you can set up just about any scenario for making money including setting yourself as the bookmaker. BetAngel even works with Excel spreadsheet so you can have some really sophisticated triggered betting.

Due to the day out I will not get time to follow up on the 80/20 tips on the horses either. Today I was busy editing the Wizardcast 31 in which I showed some of the basic functions of BinarySoft BDI betting software. I like the software because it works native on my Mac and it has a full ladder for trading. It does take a little getting used to at first due to the binary nature of how it works and the odds being represented by nought to one hundred, instead of the Betfair odds. In this latest version you can see the equivalent Betfair odds as a tooltip when your hover over the Binary odds though and that makes it easier to work.

With BinarySoft BDI the closer you get to the event being realised the closer you get to 100. So if you buy a position on the under 2.5 goals , which is the same as a back bet, at binary 50 which is roughly 2.00 in Betfair odds, the closer the odds get to 100 the closer you are to winning the bet. You can buy at 56 (1.79) and sell at 58 (1.72) to make a profit trading in and out.

Just have been trading on the Ajax vs Rotterdam game with the under 2.5 and the under 3.5 goals markets. I was lucky to have all my trading finished before the 34 minutes goal spree that saw the scoreline jump to 5-1 before the half time whistle.

I have my 1% trading profit in the bag already with trading on that game and also the Schalke vs Wolfsburg game. I am taking a cautious approach with my trading at the moment and it seems to be paying off. It is nearly half time with the Schalke game and it is still nil-nil. I probably could have taken more from the game but after the initial trades I have decided that I should wait until a goal is scored before having another go. If I do I might even go back in on the under 3.5 goals market on Betfair and keep the safety in the trading.

Today I am trading with BinarySoft BDI which has a 3 month trial period and I like to use because I can use it native on my Mac. I am totally impressed with BetAngel and can do more with it such as dutching, hedging, , bookmaking, making a market and just about everything. It even links up with Excel the spreadsheet and can do automated trading. I don’t have Excel on this machine though. The graphs on BetAngel’s enhanced ladder tab are just great because they update live.

BinarySoft BDI is supposed to be getting graphs soon also, only today there were upgrades to the interface which I found very welcome. The windowing is good, even though I prefer not to have too many window scattered all over the place. I found that all I need to tear off, to have separate, is the market selection window. Then when I have the markets chosen I can hide it away.

Last weekend I recorded a video of the software in action but I may have to start again as the interface looks a little different now.

Racing Place and 80/20

80/20 recommend that you should have 30 times stake as your betting bank

The results not great so far today but there is still the Wolverhampton races to finish yet. I have been setting up the bets using BetIE and keeping score in a spreadsheet. Using the RacingPlace tips and the 80/20 today has been a poor day altogether and unless something good happens in the last 2 races half of the good start we had on day one will be wiped out. This is why they recommend that you should have 30 times stake as your betting bank. So for me with this test that would be 30 times 20 = €600.

Thank goodness for the learning mode in BetIE that’s what I say!!

Successful trading last night using BetAngel. I put in my first trade in the Spurs game after the first goal. I traded until I had about half of my target 1% of my betting bank and greened up. Then I moved to the under 3.5 goals market to set up a new trade.

I also got a trade going on the Bolton game and did the same and then greened up. Decided to grab a bit more from trading on the Benfica vs Nurnberg. I did this one as it was quite late in the game and quite likely that it would stay under 2.5 goals.

In the end I made 2.28% profit on the betting bank which was good going and safe too.

RacingPlace and 80-20

Another day yesterday with a small loss 0.32 points which for the 20 euro bets I am working with equals €7.33 after the commission is taken into account. We have to remember that this is a long term propostion and 2 days with a small loss is not the end of the world. What I have done also is to sign up for the 7 day free trial of the tips from 80-20 itself and will look at it separate to see how it works out with profits. I looked into the January and February stats for their tips and did a spreadsheet to work out how the money would have worked out with my stake size.

By my calculations it took them two and half days to get into profit in January and the rest of the month was just a gradual growth of the betting bank. The day one was minus 46 euro and the day two was minus 2.76 euro and day three saw a profit of €57.56. During the month the daily profit varied between minus 140 and plus 137 Euro and the final tally for the month was a profit of €404. Now you have to bear in mind that this is an approximate figure because I could have gone into the bettiing exchange at a different time of day and gor different odds completely. Perhaps better, perhaps worse odds. I expect we would not be too far out though.

With my direct and live test of the numbers I am still in profit after 3 days of testing by €146 and it is still too early to say if it will be a total success for the month. Looking very promising though. Also today I have checked the prices in Betdaq instead of Betfair for the Racing place tips and Betfair for the 80-20 tips.

During the day I set up the bets for the Racing place tips but again with the 80/20 staking plan. Didn’t go as well today and the day ended -€5.76 which is -0.28 points. The profit overall is still 7.65 points at €153 after Betfair commission.

I bet on 21 horses, there were 4 winners and 5 placed which is quite poor as a strike rate. Taking that into consideration I would say that the 80/20 place was the saviour of the day, bumping up the overall profit.

I have set up 17 bets on horses out of 18 selection for today, on one horse the odds for the place bet  was below the 1.27 minimum on Betfair. So lets see how things work out for today with BetIE.

Football Trading

Last night I traded using BetAngel and Soccer Mystic on the Brann (Norway) vs Everton game and also the Rangers vs Panathanaikos. I got the 1% of profit and shut up shop. Both of the games finished under 2.5 goals. Everton winning by 2 goals and nil nil with Rangers, so I could have possibly made more on the games with bets later in the games and without trading out particularly with the Rangers game, but 1% is the target and I plan to stick to it.

I like BinarySoft especially because it works native on my Mac. It may not have all the bells and whistles that BetAngel or Soccer Mystic has but for me to use without starting up A Windows environment via Parallels. I did a small trade already on the England vs Switzerland game on later today. Greened up already! I have more funds to add to the betting bank today also so that will make it better for trading.

Forex

The forex account is doing well so far this month 1% increase already of the balance due to the grid trading. Good to see the price going up and down as that’s when it is making money.

And I will not be able to do much with it as it is the weekend of Carnaval on the Costa Brava and in particular today in Platja d’Aro. Heading out to see the parade in about 15 minutes and all the games start in 30 minutes time, so I will be out and will miss them. But sometimes you have to have a life too.

I did do something with the one game that started at 13:45 between Manchester City and Arsenal. I had a go with the unders after the first goal was scored by Arsenal at nine minutes into the game. I put one the back side at 2.32 and traded out at 2.26. I had not set it to green up and the profit was all on the unders. I was using BetAngel / Soccer Mystic to do this trading. It was a good job I didn’t do much else with the game as the second and third goals came with in a couple of minutes of each other at about 26 minutes. That finished off that market and I toyed with the idea of looking at the under 3.5 and the under 4.5 markets but it was lunchtime and I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the matter in hand.

The fulltime score just finished was 1-3 to Arsenal and with that I would have lost with the correct score market, if I had put money on it. I was only able to dutch it in learning mode today anyway. If I was doing it for real I would have put something on the possible 1-3 as it was not covered by the unquoted scores part of the dutch. I would have been able to reduce the loss by a few euro anyway.