Betfair trading – Lay the draw – Automatically

Overview of the Lay the draw Betfair trading strategy

Trading football is an intuitive and popular strategy on Betfair, everybody has an option on a football match and therefore sports traders often do something on football as it is clearly definable and easy to understand.

This trading strategy is one of the oldest sports trading strategies around and lots of Betfair football trading strategies find their origin in it or variations of it. This football trading strategy is quite simple to understand and pretty popular when trading on Betfair football markets. To perform the trade, you Lay the draw, then when a goal is scored you trade out for a profit. You are all green before the final whistle!

The key to laying the draw and to getting a winning trade is a combination of match selection, the draw odds and whether or not the underdog scores first. The underdog tends to be the away team, but not always. The home team could be the underdog if the home team is playing an away team at the top of the league.

You also need to think about your exit strategy, should you exit for a small profit or hang on until later in the match when the chance of a draw declines dramatically. A lot of recommendations are based around the 70 minutes mark, but if you use Bet Angel’s specialist football trading tool, Soccer Mystic. You will get a much more accurate measure of when to do something and what happens when a goal is scored.

As with all Betfair trading strategies, your long term profitability will be determined by your strike rate and payoff. The draw price is a key element. Because you are laying the draw, a high draw price tends to imply it’s less likely and that a goal is more likely and you will get a pay-off. But if you get it wrong and have laid the draw at a high price, then it’s unlikely you will get a small loss come full time.

Automate your lay the draw strategy

Where Bet Angel comes into its own as a product is the advanced automation in Guardian. You can use this to either scan markets to highlight opportunties for you, or to trade semi or fully automatically. There are many Guardian automation files for use on Football markets which you can download from here: –

https://www.betangel.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=50

The following, is a reworked version of the original Lay the Draw Strategy, the key difference is instead of triggering a green up bet if the draw odds have risen (as this can also happen when a red card is given) this version now uses a 2nd automation file which is applied to the CS market to continually test the 0-0 score. You can download the automation file from the dedicated thread in the forum: –

https://www.betangel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=17043

There are therefore two files to download, the main ‘lay the draw file’ which is, of course, is applied to the match odds market and will place a £10 lay bet on the draw at the best price 1 minute before K.O, during the match if a goal is scored it will then green up, it will do this approx. 60secs after the market unsuspends allowing time for it to reform so that you green up at a good price.

The second file called ‘Check 0-0 CS and Store Value file’ is applied to the Correct Score market, its job is simply to store the price of the 0-0 scoreline and share that with the main lay the draw file.

So, after adding the match odds and Correct score markets for each game you’re interested in and applying the relevant files to each it would look like this on your main guardian page

How it Works

When the match kicks off the ‘Check 0-0 CS and Store value’ file will continually store the current back price of the 0-0 score line every 60 seconds as a ‘shared stored value’ which I’ve named ‘odds’.

The green up rule within the lay the draw file then has a ‘Stored value condition’ to test if the value of the stored value named ‘odds’ is greater than 40 (ie, the price on the 0-0 CS must be greater than 40 before this green up rule is able to trigger). Once it is that would indicate that a goal has been scored and therefore the green up rule should now trigger.

The reason this works is because during a football match even if a score line is no longer achievable people can still bet on it, so you will always see money still offering to lay usually at 1000 in the hope that someone miss-clicks and backs – even at these odds it’s a sure thing if that result is impossible.
You could set the conditions to test for a back price of 1000.0 instead of 40 as 1000 is what will be offered in almost every major match following a goal, but if you want to run it on low-level matches with less traded money odds then of 1000 won’t always appear even after a goal so using a price around 40 allows the files to be run on a wider range of matches

To use these files just click on the following two links below ’Lay the Draw.Baf’ and ‘Check 0-0 CS and Store Value.Baf’ and this will download them to your computer, then with guardian open on the “Automation” tab click “Import a Rules File” as shown in the image, once imported it will now appear in the drop-down box just above, you can now apply them to any markets you have added into guardian.

Once you have it imported into your Guardian the stake size along with any other aspects of this file can be edited very easily by clicking on “Edit Rules File”.

With any automation bot always run in practice mode first to ensure everything is working fine, and repeat this each time you make any changes.

To see a video tutorial on how to download and import an automation file into your Bet Angel please see this link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Im4pj683g