27th April 2002 - issue 14

Thanks to the following readers who have kindly shared their thoughts and experiences on bookie free betting. 

1. Using Betfair as a guide to potential winners:  a word of caution

Mike

With regard to your article about following the market on Betfair in issue 13.......a lot of the information around is rubbish and affects the market. Several horses have recently been heavily backed which "allegedly" have not been fit and have been well beaten. I would advise people not to follow the market trends and only a few races a week are "carved up"

The first day at Cheltenham was probably a fluke....Hors la Loir was in a way a fortunate winner. The racing is so competitive that it is unlikely that market differences were caused by clever money on Betfair. Baracuda was a virtual certainty - backed like crazy ante post - and drifted on course, Betdaq and on Betfair.....so I would ask the question "why was it not shorter on Betfair?"

It could be that I'm wrong, a study over a few months would be required to form a realistic view, but my feeling is that it would be inadvisable to follow the market trends on Betfair.

Ronnie The Penguin - Full Time Bettor

Thanks for that Ronnie! As I said in the article these observations were based on limited experience, although I still believe there could be something in it.  It is good however, to get the view point of someone who makes a full time living from backing and laying horses and other sporting events. Now we move on to Andrew who emailed me to share his recent bookie free experiences when betting on the recent Pop Idol event.

2.  Betting p2p on Pop Idol

Hi Mike,

I was betting (and laying) on two Pop Idol related events. The first was overall winner, which I backed Will with £50 at 5.0 Then second was who was to be evicted for each week. I put large sums on Hayley, the week she was evicted at only 1.4 and whoever was evicted the week before her at similar odds.

The next week, I put £200 on Darius to be evicted at 1.3. 2 hours before I lost my nerve (luckily) and managed to lay it all at 1.3. This was lucky as Zoe gave her weakest performance in the whole show and was promptly evicted whilst Darius was superb.

At this stage there were 3 left. Darius' strong performance had seen him shift from 12.0 to win it down to 4.0 (If only I could have predicted that shift!) Will had given such a poor performance that his odds went from 5.0 all the way up to 12.0! 12.0 for the eventual winner with only 2 weeks to go! Gareth was still outright favourite hovering between 1.25 and 1.3.

My plans to lay Will below 5.0 had gone horribly wrong. I thought Darius now had a good chance of winning it so I backed him £100 to win at 4.0. Of course he was then evicted the next week!

(This is the interesting part!) When Ant and Dec announced the results (the week Darius was evicted), we were told that there was only 0.5% between Gareth and Will. Then there was an interview with Gareth on ITV2 by Kate Thornton. She said, "how do you feel now that you have lost your lead for the first time?" She was then obviously told off by her producers through her earpiece and started stuttering, "er.. um.. we don't actually know if you've lost your lead.. umm"

Given these two pieces of information, I couldn't believe it when I saw that the odds for Will went down to 4.2 and not any lower. I estimated that Will had about a 50/50 chance of winning. Whilst he would likely get most of Darius' fans, there would be a lot more people voting than any other week so a lot harder to judge. Odds of 4.2 for something with 50% probability doesn't come round every day. But I had just lost £100 on Darius, so I only put another £50 on Will to win. Still £100 on a 4.6 winner ((5.0 + 4.2) / 2) isn't too bad!

Best regards

Andrew

Well done Andrew, glad to hear that you came out on top.  By watching ITV2 you got an insight that many you were betting against may not have had, showing the importance of thorough research and getting an edge on the market.  As you say odds of 4.2 on what appeared to be an evens shot was tremendous value. If anyone else has any experiences or insights they would like to share I look forward to hearing from you.