3. Setting Odds

In the section 2. we asked  what happens if you want to bet £50 at a certain price but there is only £20 available

You could place the whole £50 bet at 1.73 and leave some of it unmatched.  This would mean that £20 would be immediately matched at 1.73, and the price in the blue square would move to 1.71.  The remaining £30 would be put up in the pink box on the right, essentially saying that you are offering to bet at 1.73 for £30 if someone is willing to lay at that price.  This will be shown by replacing the pink box (with 1.75 in it) with 1.73 and £30, and moving the original 1.75 offer to the right (as its a worse offer - they wanted bigger odds than you).

In this situation the position is that you have committed to a £20 bet at 1.73, but the other £30 is unmatched, and unless someone comes along and takes those odds before the race, or you cancel that part of the bet, then the money will be returned to you after the race.

In fact there's nothing to stop you asking for a price of 101 (100-1) on Contraband, its just its not going to get matched, so while you can set you own odds, its only going to work if someone else is willing to match your bet.

Hence you are faced with a choice

  go for the bigger odds of 1.73 but risk only having £20 on

  take the lower odds.

Usually the best thing to do is to go for the price you want and then monitor the situation, and if the rest doesn't get matched, considering altering the price you are willing to take to get it matched.

After You've Bet - See the Market

Once you've bet you can see the implications on your bet by the red and green numbers next to each horse on the left of the screen.  In this example it tells you that if Contraband wins you make £21.90 profit, but if anything else wins you lose £30 (being your stake).  Your stake will have already been taken from your available funds so if you lose your account wont go down any more, but this information makes it very clear what your profits/losses will be.

For a single win bet this may seem a bit obvious, but if you imagine that you might back more than 1 horse, or maybe lay a horse or two, or perhaps back a horse at 10-1 and then lay it at 6-1 later when the price comes in, you can see that having a clear view of your overall position is a VERY useful tool for seeing your matched bets.

Tracking Unmatched Bets

When you place bets that don't get matched you can track them through the "my bets" screen (which is to the write of the odds).  This shows you both your matched and unmatched bets, and allows you to easily adjust and resubmit your unmatched bets if you want to.

In this example we have tried to get £5 at odds of 50 (49-1) on Contraband, and not surprisingly it has not been matched, so appears in the Unmatched section with the options to edit the numbers in the white boxes and then "Update" by clicking the green button at the bottom.

Below this you can see the matched bet we have £30 at 1.73 for a profit of £21.90.

One other thing worth mentioning is that unmatched bets get deducted from your available funds.  This makes sense as they could get matched at any second and hence you need to set the money aside for them.  This means that unless you have pots of cash you probably wont want to leave too many bets unmatched for too long as you wont have any money left to bet, so you may want to adjust or cancel bets that don't look like being matched

Next:  Laying to Lose