With the advent of online betting exchanges such as Betfair, a lot of people are starting to lay potential losers as well as backing winners. If the odds change in your favour, you can even place a bet and lay it off to guarantee a profit whether your chosen selection wins or not. You can’t do this all the time but there is a good deal of fluctuation in the prices on the betting exchanges that it is possible quite a lot of the time.

Given that there can only be one winner in a race and that picking that winner can be a difficult process, a lot of people have turned to laying losers instead.

So is this a good idea?

Start by remembering that Murphys Law can and will operate whenever you try something new.

Picking losers is as much an art as picking winners.

Sure, there’s an exceptionally high chance that the 50/1 shot in the race will be nowhere to be seen by the time the first horse crosses the winners line. But if you’ve laid it and the outsider horse does the unthinkable and wins, you’re out a lot of money. The person placing the bet wins 50 times their stake but, as the bookie in this situation, you lose 50 times the amount you were hoping to win. Not a good place to be!

Which means that if you chose to lay losers you need to be careful in your strategy.

One way to do this is to lay more than one horse in a race. After all, there can only be one winning horse in any given race. That’s what the bookies do and almost all the time it works for them. You’ll need to balance your books – chances are that you won’t be laying every single horse in the race and, even if you did, it’s unlikely that you’d attract precisely the amount needed to ensure you’d win regardless.

Systems like Betfair will show you your position on screen so you can adjust your offering accordingly, but it will take practice to achieve this in every race.

You don’t have to lay every horse in a race to show a green (positive) position so long as your liabilities are carefully chosen. Unless you’ve got a head for figures, it may pay you to create a simple spreadsheet that will show you how much you should lay at a given price.

Short priced favourites – those below evens – are often a target for systems that lay horses. They don’t win every race and when they lose, you get more than your stake back. If you chose to go down the route of laying odds on horses, it will pay you to check your system through on paper first so that you know the kind of races they are likely to win hands down and the ones where there’s a good chance that they’ll not quite make it to first position.

There’s also a good case for backing potential winners and laying potential losers in the same race. You can either do this so that you win nicely if your chosen horse wins by scooping up the winning bet plus all the laid amounts, or you can lay off some of the risk of your chosen horse not winning if its odds shorten between the time you place your bet and the start of the race.

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Category: Sports
Keywords: betting exchanges,lay losers,back winners,backing winners,lay potential losers