Turn a losing betting strategy into a winning one
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a losing betting strategy and miraculously turn it into a winning one? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
We will take a strategy that only has a 25 % win rate and transform it into a strategy that wins 95 % of the time, by converting a traditional tennis betting approach into a Betfair trading strategy.
Laying favourites in tennis matches
The strategy is simple: lay the favourite in each tennis match.
We lay each favourite to a £10 liability, so our worst possible loss is always £10, no matter what price the favourite starts at. By capping the downside, we still retain the chance of a much larger upside.
It’s generally accepted that betting markets are efficient, so what happened on this occasion?
Across 20 matches the outsider won only 25 % of the time, meaning the favourite obliged in 75 % of matches.
Despite that, we lost just £5 overall after risking £200 in total. Your job now is to claw back that £5.
Why trading tennis will help you win more often
Traditional betting depends solely on the final result of the match.
A betting exchange changes everything because you can bet in-play and cash out whenever you decide. Your loss is capped, yet the profit potential remains for the whole match.
Tennis prices frequently swing back and forth during a match, giving several chances to lock-in a profit. That opportunity simply doesn’t exist if you place a straight bet and leave it to settle.
Betting is outcome-dependent; trading is process-dependent. Think of betting on a coin toss versus trading the coin while it’s spinning.
In 19 out of those 20 matches there was at least one chance to trade out for a profit.
Most tennis traders exit when the favourite goes a break or a set down – a momentary shift that usually pushes the price high enough to green-up.
Had you exited at the absolute peak in every match, the cash-out value was around £300 for a £10 liability – clearly unrealistic, but it shows what’s available.
You only need to capture a fraction of that £300 to overturn the £5 loss and move into profit.
Summary
Laying favourites to a fixed liability delivered only a small loss, defining the threshold we needed to beat.
By searching for profitable exit points in-play, even a modest slice of the available volatility was enough to beat that threshold.
That’s how you turn an unprofitable betting strategy into a winning trading strategy – simply by exploiting the natural ebb and flow of tennis odds.
Apply the same logic, add a little tennis knowledge, and you can do exactly the same.