General Ramblings

Please forgive the rambling nature of this entry, but with me now back in my hotel for a couple of nights, it’s once again time for me to ponder on all thing betting – without actually getting involved.

I’ll start by detailing for anyone who is interested, how I got started in betting. I was browsing Martin Lewis’s Money Saving webite, when I came across the well-known article on “Matched Gambling”. I hadn’t ever really been interested in gambling before reading this, but it instantly drew my attention.

For those who don’t know, the “matched gambling” technique is simply taking the “free bets” offered by most bookmakers and laying them off on Betfair to eventually guarantee a profit. In this way, I first funded my Betfair account with well over £5,000. Since then, in five years, I have not once had to make a single deposit into my account, and have steadily withdrawn from it whilst maintaining a healthy betting fund. From there, I ventured into straight backing and laying, absorbing any good books that I could find on the subject, whilst also working hard on generating my own stats and looking for edges.

Something I figured out for myself at a very early stage then was to ask myself these questions:

• What are the minimum odds I require to stay in profit based on the win rate percentage of XX.X ?
• What is the minimum win rate percentage I required to stay in profit based on average odds of X.XX ?

Of course, each question is the inverse of the other. But either way, this is an important/vital question that must be asked, and answered. If you are a straight backer/layer, do you know the answer to these questions? Do you even know how to work it out?

Okay, at the danger of teaching my granny how to suck eggs, let’s say you back a hundred horses at average odds of 1.60 and you have a 4.40% commission rate on Betfair, what is the minimum win rate you require to avoid going into the red? It’s simple really: (100 / your_average_odds / 100) + commission_rate.

And if you have a win rate of 55% on straight betting football match odds, what is the average odds you need to stay in the black? Its: 1 / ( win_percentage + commission_rate ).

Okay, these are simple calculations and everyone of you should know these things, but it’s surprising how many people don’t. What about how to inverse back-odds to lay-odds? Do you know how to do that? It’s: (back_odds / (back_odds -1) ). Or to inverse lay-odds to back-odds, it’s: ( lay_odds / (lay_odds -1) ). Yes, it’s that simple. In fact it’s simple as a wrinkle on a pimple.

Once again, you all have my apology if I’m teaching things that you’ve long known, but sometimes we all need a little reminder of the basics. And so, from the stats above, if you win percentage is not high enough for the average odds that you are backing, then you either need to find some way to increase your win rate, or else you need to raise up the odds in order to hit a valid line. Otherwise it’s all pointless and you’ll steadily lose your bank.

Personally, I’ve largely moved away from straight betting these days. Using the calculations above I soon realised that my edge on fixed odds betting was just too small, and that commission was wiping-out all my hard-earned profits. This is why I moved over to trading/scalping, where I have found things to be much healthier for me.

As you have already seen from the small sample of blog entries so far, my trading/scalping is a little bit of a roller-coaster ride, but even with these unnecessary swings in fortune, I still manage to make some money from my trading. If I can learn to lessen the swings, then I feel that I could be heading for larger profits in the near future. Then again, this is all our hopes, isn’t it?