In this series of articles we’re going to speak about a few beginner-level inplay football betting strategies. Inplay betting is now a bookie’s best earner, it’s almost hard to believe that it wasn’t around just a few years ago, but then again, of course it wasn’t. Imagine trying to do inplay betting in the days when you actually had to leave the house, walk into a bookies, look for a pen, hand over your slip to a cashier. Poor Karen would be all aflutter if 15 people were handing her slips as half time approaches.

Anyway, we’re getting off the point, inplay betting is big now, massively so. It’s so big that the ad breaks in football matches used to have B-list celebrities giving live odds for the matches being shown. These ads are banned now in the UK, but they’re still shown on TV networks all over Europe as bookies look to get more and more people involved in their markets. Obviously it’s working, if we just look at the amount of new bookmakers that have hit the market in the last five years alone we can see that it’s incredibly lucrative.

Laying the Draw

Laying the draw is one of the first ‘laying’ strategies that you come across when you start using a Betting Exchange. It’s basically betting against something happening. So, with inplay betting it’s obviously going to be a popular method.

Let’s take an example; it’s 0-0 and halftime and the home side are peppering the visitor’s goal and were dominante for the final 15 minutes before the referee whistled for the break. The opening odds for the draw were 3.65 and are now at 2.50. If you lay £5 on this your liability will be £7.50 and if the match ends in a victory for either side you’ll win the £5, minus commission.

Another option though would be that once the home side score you can ‘cash out’ and take the profit that’s on offer. The Cash Out option has also become popular with many traditional sportsbooks now offering it on their markets too.

Some things you need to be aware of though, if the match remains 0-0 you’ll lose your stake. In a match where the underdog scores first the draw odds won’t change much (unless it’s late in the match); the reason being that the market will expect the favourite to score and level things up. You have a few options here; cash out for a small profit or loss, leave your stake in the market and hope the favourite don’t score, or leave it and hopefully we’ll see the favourite score twice. Either way, all you want to happen is that the match ends in a victory for one of the teams.

How to Pick ‘Lay the Draw’ Matches?

We should look at matches were the favourite needs to win, the reason being is that we want the odds to drastically change once the favourite takes the lead so that we can have the option of cashing out immediately. Or we can leave our stake in the market until full time if we think the opposition won’t draw level as the match progresses towards full time.

Let’s say there’s a fixture round of cup matches coming up this week, now while normally bettors run a mile at the early stages of the competition they can be ripe for some inplay lay the draw opportunities. For example, if a Premier League side are away to a League One team and it’s 0-0 at 75 minutes, everyone and his dog knows the PL side don’t want a replay as they have upcoming Champions League matches on the horizon that are far more important. For the last 15 minutes they’ll up the ante and try and get that goal to win. This will of course open opportunities for the underdog too as they’ll be able to counter attack more with the favourite pushing.

We should also look at the stats for the underdog, if they’re a team that gets on the scoresheet a lot that’s far better than a defensive-minded team who try to grind out 1-0 wins all the time. If we see that they’re a team that does get on the scoresheet constantly then we can be confident that if the favourite doesn’t score then the underdog could also win this lay bet for us.

Using Bet Dynamo to find Lay the Draw Opportunities

We have a big match in the Swedish Allsvenskan this week where AIK are home to Goteborg. AIK are currently third in the league and with the end fast approaching can move into second behind league leaders Djurgarden should they win here. Goteborg are sixth, but with a win could leap up to forth and just be just a point behind AIK in the league.

We can see from the Bet Dynamo software that this match is ripe for a Lay the Draw chance should it be a draw at halftime or later. Some people prefer to wait until 60 minutes or even 70, but feel free to do what suits you best and until you’re confident you should probably just paper trade. Anyway, we can see that AIK have scored a second half goal in 58% of their home games and Goteborg have scored in 92% of their away matches. Add to this the stat that AIK average 0.75 of a goal per second half and Goteborg score 1.17 goals per second half on average and you’d expect either side to get a second half goal here. So long as it’s 0-0, or 1-1 with a decent amount of time left we’d be confident of putting in a Lay the Draw stake here.