The mantra that I often push on this site is that you should always focus your gambling efforts on winning little and often and build your cash pot up slowly. Of course there is a time and a place for a cheeky £1, 8 team accumulator, but in the main I prefer to bet bigger on low returns and that method has proved successful for me over the years.

Something I want to talk about today is exchange betting, particularly ‘lay’ betting to help you increase your pot even further. Once again, you won’t have massive returns on this, but lay betting can help you take advantage of the people that I like to call the ‘dreamers’. Firstly if you are unsure of what exchanges are then check out my article here which will explain it.

Now, your options for exchange sites are mainly Betfair, Smarkets and Betdaq, my advice would be to use Smarkets as they only charge 2% commission on winnings, compared to 5% on the other sites.

Method

So here is how I play it, I like to do £20 bets but you can of course use how ever much you see fit, also I usually place my bets pre match for this. I do occasionally place in-play bets if I’m watching the game but more often than not I will scan the available bets pre game. Remember with lay betting that you are betting on something ‘ not ‘ happening so, as simple as it sounds, the job is to look for something that is highly unlikely to happen.

The second part of the puzzle is that once you have found an event or a selection that you want to bet on, you need to ensure that someone else has decided to place money on the ‘crazy’ event happening and trust me, there are a lot of ‘dreamers’ out there. Bear in mind that with exchanges you are simply betting against other users, when you lay bet, you become the bookie.

Take last night for example, for Norwich to beat Spurs 2-0, had odds on the exchange at 12/1 and someone or perhaps more than one person, had offered up money to the value of £24.50 that this would happen. Now lets look at this, firstly, Spurs have lost only once away all season, and only 3 times at all this season. Spurs have the best goal difference in the league and have only failed to score in 1 game. Norwich sit 17th in the table having won only 4 home games all season and have shipped 18 goals in 11 games. The idea of Norwich winning this at all seemed crazy, let alone 2-0. So I matched the odds and laid down the full £24.50 against Norwich winning 2-0.

The Danger

There is great danger that could come with a bet like the this, especially in an industry as turbulent and shocking as football. If I win the bet then I only win the stake that the punter put up, so I would win £24.50, minus the 2% commission from Smarkets giving me £24 profit, which to me feels like easy money. However, if the unthinkable happened and somehow Norwich were to miraculously beat Spurs 2-0 then I would lose £294, this is my £24.50 stake times by the 12/1 odds that I gave our ‘dreamer’. It can be risky but if you do your research well, and pick the right bet it doesn’t need to be, start off with lower odds possibly and a lower stake if you are worried about losing big if a miracle occurs.

The best way to approach this is by doing a hypothetical plan for a week or two as I discussed last week. In my opinion this is easy money, I have only lost once in a big way but the profit that I had made before hand easily covered this loss. Go get that money guys!!!