Is Laying the Draw still profitable in 2022? Surely by now all the potential value in the markets has been swept up thanks to its popularity with traders across Betting Exchanges? Well, not quite. If you can calculate value and you’re able to correctly adjust odds to each situation you can still find plenty of value when Laying the Draw.

Lay the Draw 2022

First up though, for those of you who are new to betting we’d better explain what Laying the Draw means. On Betting Exchanges you can either Back or Lay bets. If you back a bet, say, Manchester United to beat Watford then you need Man United to beat Watford for your bet to win. However, because Man United aren’t very good, you might want to bet against them winning. You are Laying Man United in this case, on a traditional bookmaker it would be the same as backing Watford on the Double Chance market, i.e. the match will have to either end in a draw or a Watford win for your bet to pay out. It’s as simple as that.

When Betfair opened its digital doors to the public in 1999 they were the first bookie to offer such bets and after a short time people were plunging into this market because of the great value odds they could get for Laying the Draw, i.e. betting on either of the teams playing a particular game to win it. It remained a popular bet, or strategy for many, many years but over recent years in particular it has fallen in popularity largely thanks to two factors; more markets are available on and secondly, punters have come to believe that there’s less value to be hoovered up on the Betting Exchanges.

However, if you ask 10 different sports bettors for their definition of what ‘value betting’ means they’re all likely to give you varying degrees of a different answer. Some points might be the same but what one person thinks is value in a certain match may be a totally different thing for another punter and if the general public thinks that there’s no value to be found then we can certainly believe that they’re wrong. What was it George Carlin used to say? Something like; think about how intelligent the average person is and then realise half of them are stupider than the average guy. Something along those lines anyway. At Bet Dynamo we’re all about betting smarter, not harder.

Lay the Draw 2022

First and foremost you need to know what value betting is. We’re written extensively about it here and here. Examine those articles and learn as much about value betting as you can and learn to read odds so you can see what they actually represent. Remember too that bookies, if you’re not using an Exchange, take their cut whether a bet wins or loses, this is called an Overround, which you can read about herehere. Exchanges are a little bit different, they don’t calculate their cut into losing bets, just winning ones and you can easily see them when making your selection.

We’re not doing an ad here for Betting Exchanges, we’re not affiliated with any and there are a few out there, Betfair being the biggest, then Matchbook, Betdaq and Smarkets being the main players. There are some crypto-based ones too but market liquidity, i.e. the amount of money, well, cyber money, in the markets is pretty so until they become more popular they’re not really worth getting involved with.

This is an updated version of an article from 2020 where we spoke about two particular strategies for using the Lay the Draw strategy, feel free to read it here. To finish then we would just like to reiterate then when it comes to betting on football you can’t always go with the crowd, most people lose at betting so siding with the crowd isn’t a good option here and if you’re told that there’s no value somewhere then remain skeptical and do your own research into the match or topic at hand. Not every football match is going to have value odds but if you learn to read the markets and price movements, as well as knowing the overrounds you can calculate your own odds and make smarter betting decisions.