Try not to climb The Lay Ladder

In a previous article I wrote about your liability so I thought I would carry it on with some information about the lay ladder.

I first come across this idea when I got hold of a copy of the Bank Vault Report.

Briefly the ebook covers a stop at a winner in reverse so you stop at the first loser instead, but because you may have to go through a couple of winners to get there you still want to end up in profit.

The first thing to do is consider how much you want to win after you have a successful lay.

So let's run a couple of imaginary races so you can see how this works, we will set our profit at £10.

Race 1. We bet £10.00 at odds of 2.00 our liability is £10.00 (2.00 - 1 X £10.00 = £10.00), unfortunately for us the horse wins, so we have lost £10.00 (Betfair does not charge commission on losses).

Now we go to race 2, but we have already lost £10.00 and we want to make £10.00 when we do win.

Race 2 The favourite is trading at 1.7 so we need to bet £20.00 which means our total liability is 1.7 - 1 X £20 = £14.00 we are lucky it is a cheap bet but unfortunately for us the horse wins as well!

We have now lost £10 on race 1 and 14.00 on race 2 and we still want to win £10 so on the next race we have to bet 10 + 14 + 10 = 34.00

Race 3 The favourite is trading at 2.4 so our liability is 2.4 - 1 X £34.00 = 47.60 its third time lucky for us and our horse losses it's race, so our final stake splits down like this. 34 - 10 (loss from race 1) - 14 (loss from race 2) = £10 profit.

Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as that because now that we have won we have to pay commission to Betfair which if your new is 5% and remember you are paying it on the amount you won which as far as Betfair is concerned is £34.00

So 34 X 5% = £1.70 commission so your £10.00 profit becomes £8.30 if you had of won on the first race then the commission would have only been 50p so you must consider this when working out your next bet.