Sometimes in life we need to remind ourselves of the fundamentals of whatever we are striving to be successful with in order to get our ship back on course.
With betting the biggest fundamental is value and the easiest way to make money from betting is to make your bets at odds that are better than starting price.
And beat starting price when it is adjusted down for a true market IE the prices make up a 100% chance when all possible outcomes are added up.
Starting price, especially these days with the betting exchange markets is an easy and reasonably reliable indicator of the true price/chance for any runner.
And the easiest and most efficient way to do that these days is to beat Betfair SP.
Betfair SP makes up to 100% and the prices are fair to both backers and layers.
If you can beat the Betfair SP consistently then you will make a profit.
There are tipping services that base their whole selection criteria around betting on horses that are showing signs that they will shorten in price from the morning bookie price to the starting price.
Although that is a winning strategy in itself, a better strategy is to study form and make your own selections, determine your own prices and bet where the early prices are bigger than your assessment.
That can be hard work though and you may want somebody to tell you what to bet to beat the market and if you want to be a winner without the work I would recommend Rory Delargy of the http://racingconsultants.co.uk
Rory regularly beats Betfair starting price and consequently he makes steady and consistent profits.
he also gives a full analysis of every bet he gives so you know exactly why they have made each bet. These write ups invariably include other profitable info and bets that are below Rory's minimum price
http://racingconsultants.co.uk
Updated 27 Jan 2020
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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