Predicting odds on a football match
If there is one critical piece of information if you are football trading and that is what will happen to the odds in the market they are trading if a goal is scored. Without this key stat you have no way of knowing what level of risk Vs reward you’re undertaking before opening any in-play trade.
Knowing where the odds are going is useful as you can decide if a trade is worthwhile. If you know what upside you have on the next goal and how much time is left for that goal to happen, you can decide if it is worth trading. The more open the match is and the more time left to the end of the match. The more likely it is that your trade is worthwhile IF you know what that upside is.
How better to ‘lay the draw’ with increased certainty, knowing where the price will be if a goal goes in?
Predicting football betting odds
For many years Bet Angel has had a profiling predictor tool called Soccer Mystic that is widely used by football traders all over the world, this will show you how the prices are predicted to move during a match based on the scenario’s you input pre-match, so it’s a great way to plan your in-play trades ahead of the match and there is a separate detailed blog on using Soccer Mystic you can read here.
However, Bet Angel also has the trading tools and features to display neatly on your ladder screen where the odds will reform following a goal, this is shown in real-time and constantly adjusts and updates as the time of the match progresses and the time decays.
How it works
There is an obvious but often overlooked (even by experienced traders) way to know where the match odds prices will reform after a goal and that’s to use the +1 markets. These are handicap markets so are showing you how the match odds prices will look if either team add 1 goal more to where they are now, so after a goal comes the match odds market should reform somewhere around the prices currently shown in these markets seconds before the goal was scored.
In the image below you can see above the first ladder from the Sheff Utd V West Ham Match Odds market the predictions for either a home or away goal, look closely at the prices if there was a ‘Home Goal’ scored next.
Then look at the market highlighted in Guardian, this is the ‘Sheff Utd V West Ham – Sheff Utd +1’ market (so is effectively priced as the home team Sheff Utd having one goal more than they currently have).
Now we know where we can find where the prices will move to after a goal we now need to be able to see those prices, of course, you could just open those markets in separate one-click or ladder screens but that’s so last decade. With Bet Angel you have multiple options you can use, for example, you could add them to a watchlist then pin that in an unused area of your screen and use that as your reference.
Another is, of course, to simply extract the odds from those markets and display them directly on your ladder, perfect if you have limited screen space and only want to see one market at a time on your ladder screen but still have perhaps the most valuable information of all shown on it.
To set this up is very easy all the work is done for you, you just need to download three ready-made files that you can download for free from the bottom of this post on our forum and import them into your Bet Angel,
Setting up your Automation on Bet Angel
Betfair automation is popular for a number of reasons. It’s not just that you can perform automated trading, it’s that you can use custom automation to act as an advisor to assist your existing Betfair trading. You could use it to alert you to opportunities, or in this case, use secondary markets on the Betfair exchange to give you additional information.
Display Predicted Odds After a Goal – this is a ladder settings file and needs to be imported into your ladder settings area, this will then display the ladder exactly as you see in the image above
You can, of course, use the Bet Angel ladder settings editor and edit any part of your ladder screen, so you might want to make it look like this complete with embedded charts
The other two files are both rules files
Goal Odds Predictor (H) – this is a basic rules file and needs to be applied to the home team +1 markets in Guardian
Goal Odds Predictor (A) – identical to the above rule but needs to be stored to the away team +1 markets in Guardian
Once imported into Guardian they just need to be applied to the relevant markets, In the screenshot below I’ve added the match odds market, and the home team +1 and away team +1 for three fixtures and applied the relevant ‘Goal Odds Predictor’ rules file to each of the +1 markets.
It’s now ready to use, once you open the match odds market of a fixture the predicted odds following a goal will be extracted from the +1 markets for that fixture and displayed above your ladders so you can evaluate your risk (and reward) before opening a in-play trade.
