Betfair Exchange – Trusted, Legal Online Horse Racing Betting Review

Step 4. Ok we’re nearly there, now all we need to do is deposit money into our accounts.

We want to try and keep this to a minimum though to reduce our initial outlay. That and i’m a cheapskate who doesn’t like spending money.

We’ll only deposit into Betfair for now and only £30, this leaves us a little comfort zone when placing our first bet to obtain the free £25 bet.

Go ahead and do this now.

We won’t deposit into our bookmaker account just yet. You’ll see why in a minute.

Step 5. Ok we are now setup and ready to look for our first matched bet!!

The way i like to do this is to open a new window and log into Betfair. Then open a separate window and log into your new bookmaker account. You will now easily be able to flick between these.

What we now need to do is look for very similar odds on the same event between the bookmaker and Betfair.

First find an event with your bookmaker. Let’s say a football game, as this will be what you most commonly match bet on. Now that you have selected a game, look at the odds.

Now we need to flick to our Betfair account and look at the same game. We want to check if any off these odds are similar. In order to do this we look at the odds in Pink, as these are the lay odds (see below).

Similar odds depends on how small the actual odds are. Obviously if the initial odds being compared are 3.0 at the bookmaker and 4.0 at Betfair, this is only a 1 point difference, but because the odds are small it’s actually a 30% difference.

If the odds being compared are 25.0 and 26.0 however, this is still only a 1 point difference but now only a 4% difference in the odds. You’ll be able to use the spreadsheet to check the odds you have found, and you’ll gradually see the effect.

In this instance we want to find short odds due to the type of free bet that we are placing. This is all explained in the Bet Type section.

* Remember a lay bet is when we act as the bookmaker, and this is what Betfair or any other Betting Exchange allows us to do.

Because we are using the Betfair Return if Lose (RIL) Free Bet, we need to enter -£25 into the Stake Forfeit Box.

We then enter the odds we have found into the appropriate boxes. In this case the bookmaker odds (“back” odds) into the Back Odds box and the Betfair odds (“Lay” odds) into the Lay Odds box.

Now the Betfair Free Bet is slightly different from others as the Free Bet is on our Lay Bet, as opposed to the Back bet which is usually the case. This means that we now need to toggle the “Bet Stake” amount until it produces the amount of our Return on Lose Bet in the “Lay Risk” box, in this case £25.

You can see below that using the odds 1.5/1.53 (back/lay), i had to toggle my Bet Stake to £30 to give me a Lay Risk of £25.07 (near enough).

Normally the “Back Profit”/”Lay Profit” would shown our actual profit, however for this bet we need to subtract our initial Bet Stake to work that out. In the example below that would give us a profit of £14.93, which is actually pretty poor, but this type of bet, Return on Lose on the Lay Bet, is hard to get a good return on.

If the odds you have found don’t seem to provide a very good return don’t worry, simply look for others.