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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!!
After my disappointments with the interface of Soccer Mystic yesterday , I thought I should actually read the user guide. It is good to try out software without doing that first because you get a better idea of how intuitive it is, and mostly it worked well enough. I didn’t need to have the Confirm Bets checkbox checked to make sure that the software didn’t lose me some of my betting bank when I clicked on something I wasn’t sure about. It is all pretty straight forward.
While reading the user guide I found myself thinking ‘Wow thats cool’ a few times and being impressed with the tricks it has up its sleeve to help me make money. Some of the things were a different way to do something I can do already in another part of the software, but with the control over what happens being set differently. For example in the Bookmaker tab (which only places lay bets) I can set how much I want to stake, how much I want to have as profit or just go by the minimum bet amount and then by using the Margin Maker checkbox on the unders side of the market, see what odds I need to have the lay bet go in at to make the money. It is similar to making a back bet on the unders then laying off as the price comes down when no goals are scored at the start of a match. The difference being that the back bet part of the trade is replaced by making a lay bet on the overs side.
impressed with the tricks Soccer Mystic has up its sleeve
I also tested out the Make Market button on the One Click tab. This can be used in the time leading up to the start of a game when there is not much movement in the prices. I clicked the button when the back price was 2.12 and the lay price was 2.14. Soccer Mystic then places bets on the wrong side of the market as it were. So orders went in for a back bet of 2.14 and a lay bet of 2.12. When both of these orders are filled there will be a profit due to the spread between the prices asked for in the order. I did it with the Spurs vs Arsenal game about 20 hours before the game was due to get under way, and left it overnight. In the morning both of the bets had been matched and there was a small profit from the minimum size bets Soccer Mystic had placed for me. The only thing is that you don’t have any control over which bet gets matched first and you might need a plan in case one of them doesn’t get matched when the game goes to in play. I expect though that doing this well before a game is due to start there would be only a small risk that it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to.
Another area of interest is the correct scores or even the match odds for dutching. With the correct scores there are certain scores that happen more regularly than others, so by making a bet that covers those scorelines you can have a good chance to make money. I think I would prefer to test that theory though by seeing how many times I need to win that type of bet compared to how often it loses and what effect that has on the betting bank. The strategy can be enhanced though by covering a correct score possibility that is unlikely to pay back smaller or not at all if it happens. The effect of this is that you get a better percentage profit overall while having a smaller risk. There are about 7 scorelines that happen more than others. I will give you more about that in another posting.
Soccer Mystic can also be connected to Excel the spreadsheet to make automated bets if you know how to do that in Excel. I don’t know enough about that to comment right now but will perhaps look at later.
The ability to have the stake size determined by the price you want to make per tick is useful too. This is because of the tick sizes not being equal. In the table you can see that the smaller odds have smaller sizes in terms of movement too. So if you want the same amount of profit per tick at the smaller odds you will have to increase the amount of the bet. With this you can make the same amount of money under the odds of 2.0 as you do with the odds between 2.02 and 3.00
I didn’t expect this in Soccer Mystic as I thought I would only find this in the BinarySoft program.
Looking forward to this evening and the game between Spurs and Arsenal and increasing my betting bank some more.
Trying out another strategy here with this game. I have been using the LazIE bet function in BetIE and set it to take either 1, 2 or 3 ticks with €50 trades. BetIE puts in the first bet at the current odds and fires in a market order the specified distance away. I got to the game 5 mins after it had started and went in and out 7 times with this tactic.
Testing strategies with BetIE and no risk to my betting bank
The profit at 25 minutes into the game was as you see in the image at the bottom of this post. BUT as I was writing this there were 2 goals in the space of 2 minutes. This show that some luck is required as if I had put in a back bet part of the trade at 26 minutes I would be having a hard job of trading out. In fact it got even worse as there was a 3rd goal at 30 minutes putting Manchester City in the lead 2-1 and that under 2.5 goals market is blown out. Good job I went for a one tick difference on the last trade I did. Or I would have been caught.
The strategy I was using proved successful but could have gone wrong if I had tried one time too many. The reason for trying this is down to The Sports Trader Ray in Glasgow testing it out also. 20% of his bank with the target set at 1% on the unders and 2% on the overs. I wonder how he got on with this match ??
I also saw a blog called betbot that looks interesting, he is rolling his own betting bot. Seeing as he has a programming background he has a head start on that. I would love to be able to write a program to automate the job of making money. I saw the video of the betting bot in action on a horse race and with small stakes it was doing OK. Small winnings but regular. The bot was doing all the work and reacting to the market a lot quicker than you can doing it manually. I was quite impressed.
Picture of my winnings on the Manchester City vs Blackburn match.
I looked at the Chelsea game to see what I could do with it. The plan was to put in the back bet in at the start of the game for 90 Euro and then lay off a third at 5 minutes and another 3rd at 10 minutes then green up at 15 minutes. The odds were slow to come down I thought but I still had it with 6 Euro profit on the unders when all the laying off was done. I put in an extra lay bet on the unders to leave it at about €3.80 on either side under and over. 
I did this with BetIE and in learning mode.
I also looked at the European games on but the liquidity was low on those games and I was not impressed the way the odds were moving. I did one of the games with 100 on and greened up at 15 or 20 minutes leaving a profit of 7 Euro. It was Bayern (Germany) vs Aris (greek) in which the final score was 6 – nil. The first goal didn’t go in until 25 minutes so it worked out prety good.
I wanted to make a video today of the but I left it too late, the 20 day trial was up unfortunately. I will set it up when I put in some more money into Betfair at the beginning of January. In the meantime I have been looking at the stats for the first goal in Premiership games. Using the Soccerstats.com site I put data into a spreadsheet for the first 17 rounds of the season. This is what I have come up with….
At 5 minutes 93% of games are still nil – nil
At 10 minutes 82% are still nil – nil
At 15 minutes 68% are still nil – nil
At 20 minutes 61% are still nil – nil
At 25 minutes 56% are still nil – nil
So you can see that trading in the first five minutes should be great for making money. Only 7% of the games have a goal and that doesn’t mean that the back bet placed at the start of the game is lost. Unless there is a very quick equaliser it is possible still to trade out after a couple of minutes and reduce the possible loss. Or you can place a bigger back bet after that goal and trade out as quick as you can after that to bring it even or perhaps make a profit. It needs a larger back bet maybe 3 or 4 times the original so that you are making more per tick of movement after the market reformed. Or you could leave the initial trade running and be able to trade out when the odds get back to where you started.
It all depends on the game and some knowledge of the teams would be useful too.
My next move is to watch how the odds move in the next couple of rounds of the Premiership and see what sort of movement I can expect and the money I should win when things go right compared to the money that could be lost when the goals come thick and fast. I want to know if there is an optimum level of odds for the first back bet – how fast do the odds change and how many ticks the market moves on average at the start of a game and also after a goal has been scored. I will want to see what number of ticks it is usual for the market to move to when the goal has gone in. So that if I trade out straight away what level of loss will I lock in.
I am determined to use the stats to see if I have enough of an edge to make money from this strategy. Is it best to let all games go 15 minutes and green up or is it best to lay off in 5 minute intervals. Instinct makes me think that laying off gradually is going to be a best option as the first goal gets more likely as the minutes tick by. I think that the stats will give me the best strategy for making money with this market in Betfair. I expect that the gradual lay off and a re-entry into the market after a goal is scored to make some extra trading a few ticks and maybe to add a little more at the end of a game when there is still a nil nil scoreline. There is also the under 3.5 goal market to turn to on some games which could sweeten the pot a little also.
The other statistic worth noting is that so far the percentage of goals at the final whistle that are under 2.5 goals is 53% and in combination with making sure that I have a back bet at a value price then the under 2.5 goal market will be lucrative enough.
