Following from yesterdays introduction to Dutching, today I want to tell you about Hutching and the Oddschecker Hutching calculator.
The Hutching calculator can be used like the Dutching calculator but instead of taking an equal profit whichever of your selections win. You can instead bias your bet towards a particular outcome.
So you could take all your profit from what you consider to be the most likely outcome and break even on other selected outcomes.
So you are hedging your bet, you have a bet, you expect it to win, but you want to cover some other outcomes so you hedge, hence the hutching calculator.
As an example Chelsea are 1.19 to beat West Ham tonight, so they are expected to win. If we think that West Ham are unlikely to score and Chelsea will win we could frame a bet using the hutching calculator.
If we decide to bet the correct scores of 1-0, 2-0, 3-0 & 4-0 which are priced up at 9.6, 7.2, 8.2, 11.5 respectively.
By adjusting our stakes we can pretty much break even on 1-0, 3-0 & 4-0 and take a profit of £38.60 on 2-0, for a total stake of £10.
If we've judged things correctly then that return compares favourably with the £1.90 profit from a straight win bet.
The image below shows the calculator and the stakes required.
The trouble with this hutching calculator is that you have to manually play around with the stakes to get your desired result.
And if all your bets were in the same market, then it's probably just as easy to do this directly into Betfair. But in this case our bets are spread across 2 markets.
Nevertheless this is a a useful way to frame bets to get better value and to bias bets towards what you consider to be the most likely outcomes.
Don't follow the crowd and just bet what is offered to you, hutch your way to profit.
SP Before the Off
Malcolm explains how we can know the Betfair SP and bet based on Betfair SP before the off!
Here's Malcolm…
Just about every system you come across on the web would first have been created using past data.
If this is the case then the result will be shown using either SP (Industry Standard starting price) or BSP (Betfair Starting Price) for results.
There is nothing really wrong with this because it is the only way of giving people the chance to check the results they are seeing as being accurate.
But where it does cause an issue and pose a problem is when it is a price sensitive system or a system that relies on being on a particular ranked runner, like the favourite.
BSP and SP are calculated at the off.
You may think by looking at the ranking a few seconds before the off will tell you who was favourite, second favourited etc…
But often this isn't the case. The BSP/SP announced ranking can be different to the just before the off rank.
A short test we did with Betfair some time back clearly showed that the rankings can differ by as much as 1 or 2 runners in every 10.
Maybe this doesn’t sound too bad…
…But when you consider you could be following hundreds or even thousands of bets over the course of a year…this could easily change the results you were expecting or the results being advertised.
The same is true of price. The price before the off is often different to BSP/SP causing even more inaccuracies in your system.
So what can you do to make sure you are on the correct runner or within the correct price range?
You may already know that just as Betfair's market goes in-play the BSP price and ranking is made available through their API.
So we have developed a great feature on the Grey Horse Bot that allows the bot to read the BSP price and Ranking as soon as it happens.
This gives the Grey Horse Bot user the opportunity to choose which ranked runner to bet on or to only place a bet into the market if it is within the price range you require.
When you create your own system it should be part of your testing to determine if you get better prices before the off or in-play. You can test both automatically with the Grey Horse Bot.
Thank you for reading I really do appreciate it.
Malcolm
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Malcolm is the creator of a number of Betfair automated betting products like the Grey Horse Bot. He also writes articles for Betfair. Apart from automation Malcolm likes creating and testing systems and believes his readers should have all the statistical facts available to make proper informed decisions.
If you have any questions about bots or automation please add a comment and we'll try and answer them.
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