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Betfair at The Festival
Want to get 20% better Cheltenham Festival odds than offered by the traditional bookmakers? Open an account with Betfair, the UK’s biggest betting site, and take advantage of their free £25 bet offer for new account holders. It's like trying before you buy - you get two shots at winning with your first bet. Place a bet on any 2010 Cheltenham Festival market and if you aren't a winner they'll refund your stake and give you a second shot at winning to hopefully get your Betfair betting experience off to a positive start. Click here to claim this offer.
Betfair are a betting exchange as opposed to a bookmaker. This means that instead of betting against a bookie you bet against other people with opposing views. All bets have been placed there by users who either want to have a bet in the normal way (back), or offer odds to other punters (lay).
Put simply, when you "back" a horse, you are betting that it will win - just like betting with conventional bookies. When you "lay" it, you are betting against it winning. For example, if you lay Kauto Star to win this year's Gold Cup, you offer odds to other punters who wish to back Kauto Star. If Kauto Star doesn't win, then you pick up the backer's stake. If Kauto Star wins, then you pay out. This is what bookmakers traditionally do.
Betfair is very easy to use and you will usually find much bigger odds with Betfair that any bookmaker, so it is well worth taking a few minutes to learn and get confident. Below is a screen-grab of a Betfair market with an explanation how to use it.
Betfair use the decimal odds system instead of traditional bookmaker fractional odds - it's a much simpler way of working out the odds and doesn't give you a headache every time you want to place a bet. Do you know the difference between 5/4 and 6/5? No? Well not many people do. But with decimals you'd know instantly. So, how do decimal odds work? Evens is 2 as a decimal, hence 2/1 is 3 and so-forth. Thus, if the decimal odds are 6 and you place a bet of £10 to win, your total return (including your stake) is £10 x 6 = £60. Or, if you fancy an odds-on favourite horse and bet £100 at odds of 1.8, your return (including stake) is £100 x 1.8 = £180. It's that easy!
On a Betfair market, the left side (blue) is concerned with BACKING the horse to win whilst the right side (pink) is for LAYING the horse to lose. In each square box is shown the odds available or "price" (bold figure) and the amount of money currently available for you to either back or lay.
All you need to do is state the amount you are prepared to stake and what odds you are prepared to accept or to offer.
In this example, if you simply wanted to place a bet on "Solwhit" to win the Champion Hurdle then you would look at the blue square for that horse. We can see that the odds available are 6 (5/1 in fractional odds) and that there is currently £178 available at this price. So you could decide to accept these odds and place any bet up to the value of £178 and you would immediately get it accepted. If you wanted a bigger bet, for example say you wanted to stake £200 then the first £178 would be accepted ("matched") right away but the remaining £22 would stay on the exchange waiting for someone else to come along wanting to LAY "Solwhit" at 6 for at least £22. Then that part of your bet would also be matched.
The big difference between Betfair and a bookmaker is that here you can bet that a horse will lose (i.e. not come first, or not be placed in the top three or four in the race). This is called “Laying” a bet. If we wanted to bet that "Solwhit" would not come first then we look for the odds prices in the pink column. We can see that there is currently £1294 available at 6.2. You could therefore immediately lay "Solwhit" for any stake up to £1294 in a similar way to how we backed above. When you click on the right (pink) box against that horse and enter your stake (the amount you can win) your "Liability" (the amount you could lose) will be displayed. If you layed "Solwhit" to win for £10 and it was beaten you would make £10 (less commission) - if it won, in this instance, you would payout £52.
Effectively therefore, you become the bookmaker - as you can take bets as well as accept them. You can also back and/or lay different horses in the same race or even lay a horse you have already backed (or visa versa) if the price has changed and therefore lock-in a profit, whatever the result. Thousands of people now take advantange of these "arb" opportunities which mean you can be guaranteed a profit!
It is worth noting that you do not have to accept the odds prices shown in the pink and blue boxes. Often with a little patience you can secure better prices for your bet. You’ve noticed that on either side of the blue and pink boxes there are further boxes containing odds prices and amounts of money. These represent attempts by other punters to secure a bet at more advantageous odds. The backers want to get as high a price as possible to maximise their winnings whilst the layers want to get as low a price as possible to minimise their liability.
The pink and blue boxes represent the going rate for the odds and the point at which the desires of backers and layers meet in the middle. If there are more people wanting to BACK than those prepared to LAY then this will force down the going rate as the backers fall over each other to accept lower and lower prices to get their bet matched. On the other hand if there is more money being offered to LAY than there are backers ready to accept it then this will tend to force up the going rate as the layers are prepared to offer higher odds to attract the backers. Just like any free market place it is all a matter of supply and demand determining the market price. An "unmatched" bet will wait on the system as an order until it is matched by another Betfair member. You can cancel any unmatched bet at any time, or you can adjust the price or stake.
Betfair Starting Price
Just like with bookmakers, instead of betting at a specific price you can also choose to bet on Betfair Starting Price (SP). Unlike the bookmakers, Betfair's SP is determined by balancing bets from customers who want to back and lay and because there is no margin for profit built in, you are far more likely to have better odds than the bookies’ SP. In fact, if you put £10 on every winner of the Cheltenham Festival for the past two years on the Betfair SP you’d be £3,409 better off than if you did it with the Industry SP (that figure is after a maximum deduction for 5% commission).How do I place a bet at the Betfair SP?
Firstly, you need to have the new ‘Betfair Starting Price’ box ticked above the market view. This will bring up a new column in the market view allowing you to back at SP. If you have the ‘Back & Lay’ box ticked you can also lay your selection at SP. Once turned on, simply click the SP box for the runner and rider you have selected and enter your stake opposite.
As an example, take a look at the result of the first race of the 2009 Cheltenham Festival below and you'll see the Betfair SP (BSP) against the Industry SP (ISP) and the percentage difference between them for each runner. You'll note that the Betfair SP is better for 19 of the 20 runners (Kempes being the exception) and that the difference in SP was as big as 375% for one horse. The winners Betfair SP was a hefty 35% better than the Industry SP.
Perhaps punters who backed Horner Woods (who finished second in last year's RSA Chase) at the Industry SP of 66/1 should console themselves in the knowledge that the Betfair SP (213) was 205% bigger. A return of £2130 to a stake of £10 rather than the "mere" £670 they'd have collected from their bookmaker!
