A Betfair Trader is a bit more sophisticated than your traditional gambler…  he or she is able to react to the changing sentiments of a market which in turn drive the movement of the odds.

I have played around with Betfair for a few years and looking to increase the sophistication of how I use Betfair. I currently have a simple system which is ok.. however, I want to get more out of it. If you want to read my simple strategy, click here: http://www.makemesomemoney.co.uk/2008/09/11/winning-on-betfair-my-strategy/

I have recently got hold of Easy Trader Pro 2 which shows you how to get into the more sophisticated areas of Betfair. For example, it is possible to end up with something like this:

This shows that no matter what the score is, you’ll make money! This is about the ever changing sentiment of a sports events driving changes in prices and allow you to take advantage of the situation and lock in profits.

Easy Trader Pro 2 is a collection of Betfair trading systems just like in financial trading. You can choose the one that suits you to use. There is a guide showing you the basics of Betfair and how to use each system. In addition, there are videos to further enhance your learning.

It costs £47 ($75 USD) which I think is really good value for the tuition.

You can read about Easy Trader Pro 2 and order your own by clicking here

I was playing around with trading the ladders in the Nigeria vs South Korea match but that didn’t obviously workout..  I could have ‘greened’ everything at one stage but I didn’t expect to see the draw after the third goal!

My second bet was Argentina to win… I was starting to get nervous around 70 mins when it was still 0-0 in score. Argentina were already through regardless of what happens so they didn’t have to work so hard. Greece, however, really needed a win to stay in the tournament but they played pretty poorly.. it didn’t seem as though they wanted it bad enough. When the second Argentine goal went in, I didn’t need to watch anymore.. my profit was in the bag

The World Cup so far has yielded some really funny results… if one were to bet on the favourites to win then you wouldn’t have been doing so well. What I like about Betfair is that there are so many markets which you can bet on. With markets, I don’t mean necessarily different sports.. what I mean is that within one match, you can put your money on a whole heap of different things. For example, if I take the France and South Africa football match which is happening tomorrow, there are a whole heap of ‘markets’.. see picture:

Besides the bet on who to win.. you can bet on whether there is going to be more than 1 goal (or less), more than 2 goals (or less), who to score next, the score at half time. The list you see above is just half of the bets you can have on just one game.. it really is amazing. One strategy I like to bet is the half time score or whether a particular team is winning at half time. If you put on a bet at around 35 mins for the actual score if it’s either 0-0 or 1-0 (to either) with the market prices being between 1.4 – 1.6, you tend to find that’s a winner!

Tennis is good as a market as there are only two outcomes..  win or lose for a particular player. With football, each team has three outcomes, win, lose or draw. I like using Betfair for tennis markets!

Oh, back to my bets.. I made two bets from yesterday. Correct score at half time for Brazil and Ivory coast and winner for first round tennis match between Anderson v Davydenko. I made a £42.27 profit!

Also, I tend to bet on the most likely outcomes of the football matches but of late, we’ve been getting some odd results which meant that the system that I used suffered a little. However, looks like we’re back on track again with a nice 4 win winning streak in the last couple of days!

I am thinking of writing an ebook, let me know if you’re interested by dropping me a line on alan@makemesomemoney.co.uk

Anyway, here is a screenshot of my wins the last couple of days..

I haven’t been playing with Betfair all too much but this weekend, I thought I would return and play my usual strategy… bet on the favourites (yep, that’s it!). A simple yet effective strategy which has yielded me £185! I know that there are people who trade the sports markets (particularly Horse racing but that involves staring at the markets and that just takes so much time).

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the bets and my winnings… happy days!

I am extremely excited by the prospect of this as Betfair seems to be much more easier than financial trading. With my limited experience of Betfair and taking small punts, my account has grown quite nicely. I mention Betfair trading and Betfair betting as I believe that I am currently firmly in the latter… I am betting and not trading. Betfair trading is like the next level up from successful Betfair betting.. if I can trade the Betting exchanges then the potential profits could be huge!

Some Betfair trading blogs which have made interesting reading are:

http://adamheathcote.blogspot.com/ – this guy starts off with £5000 in his account and brings home over £1000 a day in profit. This is 20% increase on his account every day.. this is amazing. He is targetting £150k profits for 2009 and he’s 22 years of age!

http://thesportstrader.typepad.co.uk/ – although this hasn’t been updated for a while, this chap, Ray was making very good money.. not sure why he doesn’t write anymore, guess he felt time was better spent making money than writing about it!

http://thebetfairtrader.blogspot.com/ – this guy was was going to pay for his wedding with Betfair profits.. he succeeded! Now his focus is to turn his original pot of £1k to £101k… sounds crazy huh? He is just shy of £50k so far….

If you read these blogs, you can’t help but be skeptical.. how are these people making so much money in such a short space of time and is it really some sort of scam. My limited knowledge and sophisticated betting techniques have yielded 50% of my betting pot… it is certainly easier than trading! I seriously think it is possible once I get the skills to be able to understand these betting exchanges. I’ll let you know how I get on with the course…

Another one of my money making streams is through Betfair, I am not a huge sports fan myself but Betfair has countless opportunities to bet and make money. I particularly like the football games where there are 3 outcomes.. win, lose or draw. In addition, there are countless number of other bets within a game.. the ones which I play on besides the win, lose or draw (the match odds), are half time odds (ie win, lose, draw) at half time, score at half time and score at full time.

The thing is, the word betting has so many negative connotations… the word bet always makes me feel that over the long term, I can’t win… so far, I have been winning but the whole concept of ‘bet’ has stunted the amount of stake I put in each time.. it’s relatively low (anything from £5 – £10 a bet). However, in light of the current success, I’ve decided to up the stakes and take it from there…

Here is my current account since the beginning of March.. I’ve made just under 40 bets and won 32 of them… not a bad result and statistically, it doesn’t look like I’m gambling. I’m in a healthy profit and have increased my account by over 25%.

Betfair does have a lot of stuff which is of the ‘real’ gambling sense.. ie no edge to allow you to win so you have to be careful with the markets you choose. Football matches are the ones which I bet with and my strategy is the most simplest ever… always bet on the favourite!!

Anyway, Betfair are giving away £25 for new sign ups currently, you can get this by joining here:
Click here to get your £25 with a Betfair account

I like to diversify the way I make money… as you know, the blog has a strong element of financial trading of which is my main passion..  unfortunately, over the weekends, the financial and Forex markets aren’t open for trading so I like to look at other things such as playing Casino or Betfair.

As a quick diversion, I have my Casino strategy that I play at http://www.600percentin6days.com and currently, it’s a free download so have a look if you’re interested.

The other alternative at the weekends is Betfair which is betting on sports. Betfair also have other things such as casino, financial bets etc. but I use them mainly for bettings on sports.

Anyway, I have found a tool called Bet Angel which is a plugin to Betfair and allows you to ’see’ the markets more clearly. Now Bet Angel can be quite a complicated program if you don’t know what you’re doing and is mainly good for the horse racing markets which are fast moving.

However, they also have their free version which you can use if you want something simple and not too sophisticated.. this is the one that I use. You can use it to watch the odds move up and down and hence trade a trend (just like the financial markets).

You can download the free Bet Angel program here:

http://www.betangel.com/downloads/index.html

There are also online videos which you can view to learn more about the Bet Angel Professional product here:

http://www.betangel.com/main/training.php

The basic tool has worked wonders for me and one day I would like to learn how to ‘trade’ using the Professional product also..  anyway, just thought it maybe useful to some of you!

Anyway, I got back on Friday and just spent the whole day knackered and tired and did absolutely nothing. On Saturday, I thought I’d go and play with Betfair again, using my strategy I’d been playing and again, I had a winning day, putting on almost 7% on my account.

If you want to read about my simple strategy, you can visit the blog entry with the rules at:

http://www.makemesomemoney.co.uk/2008/09/11/winning-on-betfair-my-strategy/

You can sign up and get a FREE £10 bet if you follow here:
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I didn’t see any opportunities today on the stock markets or Forex.. nor did I have much time so I thought I would play around with Betfair again.

Those that follow my blog probably think I’m a little crazy in that I like to dip my fingers in everything. Yesterday I talked about selling option premiums as a strategy in making money in the stock markets.. there are a few book volumes which I need to get through to understand and really get into the nitty gritty of it all. It’s a little confusing right now with all the strategies that one can follow.

Anyway, back to Betfair. I put some money on the horses today.. the strategy that I use for Betfair is very simple.. I only like to go for low risk type trades.. slowly but surely.. like the tortoise and hare story. Ok, the strategy is:

• Go to a horse race and look for the ‘to be placed’ bet. The ‘to be placed’ bet means that your chosen horse can come first, second or third in the race for you to win. In races, where there are a lot fewer horses in the race, this bet will only allow first or second as winners so check the bet rules to make sure.
• Put money on the favourite horse.. this will have the lowest number. I only put on bets if the number is between 1.35 and 1.90 .. don’t bet outside these boundaries.
• By putting this bet on, this means that the favourite horse has to come first, second (or third) for you to win.

By doing this today, I was able to put on 4 bets and win on all 4 of them for a 5% increase on my account!!! Wahey!!

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