Is This Race Better For The Backer Or The Layer? – Laying

This time last week we looked at which races may provide the backer with a better opportunity for making a profit. This week we are going to do the same for the layer.

We split all the races up by classification last week to see the best place to start for the backer or the layer. The odds were also limited to a maximum of 10/1 SP which is around 13.5 on the exchanges

As you can see there are two clear bad classifications for backers, which have been highlighted in pink, which could be good betting proposals for layers. These are NHF and Conditional Jockeys.

I am going to follow the same method that I used last time so that you can use this process in the future yourself and refer to these articles if you get stuck. This means that we need to break these two classifications down by race type to see if there is any notable information. For the moment I will also be removing our odds limit. In my experience it is much easier to work out a laying method without the odds limit and then see where the best range of odds is for the strategy and personal comfort.

You can see straight away that NHF clearly shows a very low ROI and is probably our best area to concentrate on finding races to lay. If we are concentrating on NHF races then I know that there are very few conditional jockey races that take place in this race type each year but it is definitely important to look and see how the performance if we combine both of these conditions.

Just 186 runners in one year but look at how they performed, a massive loss of over 47% ROI. In fact just laying every horse in these races to Betfair SP would have made a profit of just over 56 units in 2009. Of course you don’t want to be laying horses at odds of 200 but it shows what can be achieved.

When you finalise any laying method it is important that you remember to work it out to Betfair SP as normal SP odds are far too low and you won’t be able to get your bets on at those prices.

We are going to go back and focus on the NHF races where there are a lot of runners to see if we can find specific races which could prove more profitable for the lay bettor. We are looking to get the lowest ROI that we can get for laying selections. From the table above we can see that NHF horses already have a -27.98% ROI and see we shall be using this as the maximum ROI that our selections can have.

As before we shall look at weight rank and see what results that produces.

There isn’t a linear pattern to the ROI for weight rank, a few have produced positive returns although I suspect that if we ran the data over more than a year this would not be the case as the number of winners is very small. What it shows us is that we do not want to keep the top-weighted horse in our selections because these runners produce a far better ROI than we are prepared to accept.

Earlier I mentioned that I wanted to keep the strategy the same as last week’s so that you can use the same principles to find your own selections. This means looking at DSLR and distance to winner last time out.

As with the weight rank we do not have a linear pattern in the ROI for DSLR (Days Since Last Ran) but this is again likely to be, at least in part, due to the number of winning selections. The group 0-7 days has had a good quantity of selections and proves more profitable than the others which suggests it may be useful to remove these runners.

We know from last week that races where the horse came within 3 lengths of the winner can be considered good races. In the table above there is a significant move downwards when the number of lengths behind the winner is greater than five lengths and so this is another possible consideration.

Let’s take a quick re-cap and see what we have discovered. We want to concentrate on races that are classified as NHF. In these races we want to:

• Avoid the top weighted runner
• Avoid runners that ran within the last 7 days
• Concentrate on those runners that finished more than 5 lengths behind the winner in their last race

You now have a more specific area to focus your handicapping on. You can then look at these runners (within an odds range you are happy with) and see when there are strong contenders to take them on. When you find this situation you are likely to have found a profitable lay bet. You could also investigate finding horses to lay in Conditional Jockey classifications. There are many other factors that you can use to find your own niche using the same approach I have used in the last two weeks.