Archive for December, 2009
Betfair Commission Rates
betfair commission rates
1000 Points In One Year Of Laying, Is It Possible?
I had an email from a reader after writing the article on ‘How Important Are Recent Finish Positions’ suggesting the possibility of using this as the basis of a lay system. I thought that we would investigate this today using estimated Betfair prices to assess the profitability of the lay bets.
In the last article we discovered that when betting to win it is important that when taking the finish position of the last race a horse was in we also take into account the number of days since the horse last ran and the class the horse is going to be racing in.
The email suggested that we start from the basis of looking at laying horses who won their last race as these horses had a strike rate of 17.47% which is odds of 5.72. If we look at laying all the horses who won last time out we get:
Runners Winners Win S/R P/L BFSP EST ROI BFSP EST 9304 7641 82.13 1329.9 0.01
At first glance this looks brilliant. By just betting on all horses who won their last race we made an estimated profit of 1329.90 units (after Betfair commission) over the course of 1 year, with a strike rate of 82.13%. Unfortunately our ROI is only 1%. Lay betting return on investment is usually less than backing but 1% does not allow for any margin of error. The other problem is that a few of the odds were estimated at 700 and 800. There are people who lay these horses but I don’t want to be one of them! Knowing that we expect these horses to have average odds of just under 6 I ran the same test but limited the horses to odds of greater than 5/1. This produced the below results.
Runners Winners Win S/R P/L BFSP EST ROI BFSP EST 4577 4234 92.51 207.63 0.003
Although the strike rate increases and the profit decreases, which is expected, the return on investment decreases. This is because by only using higher odds we are risking more money for the smaller profit. We have lost over 4500 races by removing the runners less than 5/1 and these are the lowest odds. It may be possible to make a profit by just looking at the horses below odds of 5/1.
Runners Winners Win S/R P/L BFSP EST ROI BFSP EST 4292 3037 70.76 1090.57 0.13
As you can see most of our profit has come from those horses that are priced under 5/1. There is a slight discrepancy in the amount of runners because I did not include horses priced exactly at 5/1. We now have a 70.76% strike rate with the highest estimated Betfair odds at 6.15,a profit of over 1000 units and a return on investment of 13%. This could definitely be the start of a good laying system but it is important to remember that this has been analysed over just one year of data and it would be important to test over other years to see if it still holds up.
Before I finish this article I would like to take a quick look at what happens if we use one of the filters that we discovered in our last article. We discovered that horses running again within 8 – 42 days from their last race and who won their last race win much more often. Let us take a look at using this filter on its own and turn it for laying. All horses that won their last race and are not running again within 8 – 42 days from the race produce lay bet results of:
Runners Winners Win S/R P/L BFSP EST ROI BFSP EST 633 411 64.93 1658.29 1.59
Now we are beginning to shape up with a good looking system. A much lower strike rate but in return we are making over 1600 units profit in 1 year with a return of investment of over 150%.
Please don’t get too excited as more testing would need to be done. This has only been tested on data over a period of year and would need to be tested over more years to see if it continues to hold up. I would also suggest that it was tested live for a while as while the Betfair estimates are pretty accurate, there is the possibility that this may affect the results.
About the Author
The Race Advisor blog is run and edited by successful bettor Michael Wilding. It has been created to provide punters with free valuable guidelines on how to become a successful gambler. To be successful in this business requires hard work and dedication, it will not happen overnight but by using this websites free resources and articles will significantly help you gain the edge needed to make a living from betting.