Top Five Betfair Trading Strategies

Ever since Betfair emerged on the scene in the early 2000s, punters have tried to devise strategies for trading sports markets in the same way as people trade stock, forex and crypto markets.

This involves laying at a certain price and then backing at a higher one, allowing you to make a profit whatever happens – if the trade goes to plan that is…

A great deal of attention has been paid to developing Betfair trading strategies around making profits from moves in the market, with countless e-books, trading systems and forum discussions being devoted to them.

But are there any Betfair trading strategies that actually work? Can you make money from trading the markets, or is it the fastest way to the poor house?

Well, it is certainly not easy and if you are not careful, you can lose a lot of money trading. Keeping discipline is crucial and not over-trading or making impulse trades is the name of the game.

However, there are some good methods out there that if you stick to them and stay disciplined, can make a profit.

Below we take a look at the top five Betfair Trading Strategies we have come across through our extensive research and testing.

Best Betfair Trading Strategies

Below are our top five Betfair trading strategies, which cover a range of different sports and type of strategy.

These are listed from five to one, with our top Betfair trading strategy saved for last.

We hope you find these useful – and please let us know if you think we have left one off this list that should be on there!

5. Back-to-Lay Horse Race Trading

One of the features of horse racing is how much the odds can fluctuate in-running. As various horses vie for the lead or trail out the back then come with a late run, so their odds move up and down concurrently.

Whilst it is probably not advisable to try and trade horse races from the action you are seeing live – unless you are at the track and have a very fast connection – there is an approach you can use to back before the event and then lay off in-play.

The ideal horses to do this for are those that tend to run prominently, but not necessarily win many races. In other words, these are horses that will be a reasonable price before the race but likely to shorten up in-play.

Some people refer to this strategy as “dobbing” which is short for “double or bust.” So for example that could mean backing a horse at 10 before the off and then laying it off for 5 in-play. You would double your money in that scenario and not even need the horse to win – just for it to get into contention and its odds to drop to a minimum of 5.0.

Of course, you don’t need to follow a dobbing approach with this strategy – you could look for a smaller movement in-play, perhaps from 10.0 down to 7.5, or from 5.0 to 4.0.

You would not win as much with such an approach obviously, but you would normally expect a higher strike rate than if using a dobbing strategy.

It’s optimal to focus on the horse and race itself to find the most effective approach. Some horses may well often half in price, whilst others may regularly drop 30% but rarely much more than that. Being flexible rather than rigid is advisable if you’re planning on using the back-to-lay strategy.

4. Spartan Trading Tips

Spartan Trading Tips come from Patrick Ross of Tennis Trading League, something of a tennis betting guru.

What we think is interesting about the Spartan Trading Tips is they are based on a theory that has intrigued us for many years – cashing in on the big swings in odds you tend to get during tennis matches.

If you have ever spent time watching the odds of a tennis match on Betfair or one of the other exchanges, you will note the incredible fluctuations you see. This can be within individual games, as a player faces break points, or within sets as players go a break down and within matches as players win and lose sets.

So what if you could just identify matches that are likely to see such fluctuations? Or players who tend to have topsy-turvy matches (Andy Murray, looking at you!).

That is what Spartan Trading Tips does, looking to lay at a certain price and then back at a higher price, guaranteeing a profit.

The great thing about it is that you can just place the trades in Betfair before the match starts, then click “keep at in-play,” and you don’t have to monitor the match live, so you are free to get on with your day.

The trading tips have made just shy of 1,000 points profit since the service was started in 2013, which is excellent going.

So if you are looking to do some trading on Betfair that requires minimum effort on your part but makes very decent returns, then Spartan Trading Tips is the way forward.

3. Trading Late Goals in Football Matches

Football is one of the most popular sports to trade in the world and there are countless strategies out there to follow. One of the most consistent and simple to use however is trading on late goals.

This is an approach that has been used very successfully by professional traders such as Psychoff, who has refined his strategy to selecting the correct matches, entry points and exits on games he trades.

In essence though late goal trading revolves around finding matches that have a high likelihood of a goal in the closing minutes, based on the action you are watching on screen.

Whilst some study of statistics and trends before the game can be useful to identify teams who are particularly noteworthy for scoring (or conceding) late goals, the most important point is to be watching the game live and closely monitoring the markets to see whether they match what you are seeing in the game.

If there are lots of chances being created and it feels like a goal is coming but the odds don’t reflect that, that is the time to strike.

It’s important to remember that normally the markets follow a set pattern – for example if under 2.0 goals is 1.9 at kick off, it will drift down as the game unfolds (called time decay) if there are no goals, usually hitting around 1.15 – 1.20 by half time.

So there can be opportunities where this general pattern of odds decay doesn’t fit what is happening in the game and you can place a trade. There are different approaches you can use – laying the draw if the scores are level and then trading out after a goal, laying the unders, or laying a particular team if they are struggling.

If you don’t have time to watch lots of games, then another option is to use a service like Trade on Sports that has a huge database of stats on football leagues from around the world that is used to identify late goal trading opportunities. Then a bot will alert you to opportunities that arise during a game. We ran our own review of the service and it made an impressive £5120 profit over the course of a two-year trial.

Whether you use a service like Trade on Sports or your own trades though, it’s amazing just how many late goals are scored in football matches and how effective this strategy can be. Just ask pro traders like Psychoff and they will tell you!

2. Use a Professional Trading Platform

Trading on your own can be a tough and lonely proposition. Trying to study all the statistics, keep abreast of multiple leagues, identify value opportunities and make profitable trades all of your own volition is a lot to take on for one person.

The good news though is that you don’t need to do all this yourself – there are now trading platforms that due a huge amount of the heavy lifting for you, meaning you can concentrate much more on just placing the trades.

One of the most popular and effective of these is football trading platform Goal Profits, which has won multiple awards, including our very own “Best Football Betting Service 2020,” as voted for by our members.

There are so many valuable resources on Goal Profits which are explained in more detail in our full review, but the key ones can be summarised as follows:

Launchpad – complete football trading course for beginners
Trading strategies – a comprehensive portfolio of winning football trading strategies
Chat room – follow along live with their pro traders Kevin and Steve and also chat with other members
Team stats – analyse over 200,000 fixtures so you can base trades on more detailed and accurate information
Live Stats Module – use in-play stats to trade matches live and spot the best opportunities
Custom Shortlist Pro – build customised shortlists and find trades quickly and easily
League tables – at a glance see which teams play above their overall league position according to various parameters.

There is a very active and loyal community on Goal Profits, many of whom have apparently gone on to be professional traders themselves and others who use the service to provide a second income stream.

There is a lot you can learn by following along with their pro traders, Kevin and Steve in the live chat room. You will be able to see the strategies they use, how they trade them and the kind of profit they achieve.

It’s a very comprehensive toolkit for any budding football trader, which is partly why Goal Profits is so popular and has won so many awards. If you’re looking for some strategies from pro traders with the resources to support your trading, there isn’t a much better place to look than Goal Profits.

1. Betfair Scalper

The art of “scalping” is all about taking small and consistent profits from small movements in markets. In the case of Betfair, this means taking just one of two ticks in odds, for example from 2.14 to 2.12.

Betfair Scalper is a training course that teaches you how to do this. It includes ten hours of training videos, including live examples of trades and the theory behind successful scalping. It is based on trading the horse racing markets in the 10-15 minutes before the race starts, when there is a large amount of liquidity and the odds can fluctuate quite significantly.

The beauty of Betfair Scalper is that you don’t need to necessarily predict which way the market will move – doing that is very difficult indeed – but rather just profit from the small movements in odds back and forth.

We ran a live trial using the methods outlined in Betfair Scalper and had nine successful days trading out of 10, with 9.2 points profit made. Once you get the hang of it, scalping can be quite fun and even a little addictive!

On the whole it is a very good guide to scalping and can be used to make small but consistent profits from the Betfair markets.

Conclusion

There are a huge amount of Betfair trading strategies out there, whether in the form of books, articles, e-books, online services or elsewhere.

We have tested out a large number of these trading strategies and listed our Top 5 above. These are ones we have found to improve our own trading results and we hope they will for you too.

The key to successful trading is to be disciplined, plan out what you will do before you trade a match or race and stick to your entry and exit points.

Even with a great strategy, if you don’t stay disciplined then sadly you will be doomed to fail. So stick to a plan, stay focused and good luck with your trading!