Pete Nordsted - Mastering Betfair: How to make serious money trading betting exchanges

I was first introduced to Betfair whilst serving in Afghanistan in 2003. One of my colleagues asked me if I had heard about the betting exchanges and what I thought of his system. I had heard of the term betting exchange through watching At The Races on Channel 4, but I didnt have a clue what they were or how they operated.

My friend explained to me that you can lay horses in a race. In other words you could bet against the horse winning basically, he was looking to be the bookmaker.

I can remember logging on that first time in Kandahar and thinking that this did look interesting; but the internet connection was so poor we could not take it any further. However, it caught my imagination enough for me to explore the Betfair site upon returning home a week or so later. I was not new to gambling as in the early 1980s I had worked in a bookmakers taking and settling bets, but since leaving there had not been an active better. I had seen too many people gamble away their incomes and I believed there were more profitable places to put my hard-earned money.

On my return to the UK I immediately went about opening a Betfair account and started playing around by laying a few horses at minimum stakes. I believe after a few days of laying up to three horses a race I had roughly broken even. However, whilst playing around with the site I found I was becoming very interested in how the prices on the sporting markets moved whilst an event was still playing.

My first real trade came in a football match between Sunderland and Reading. I was just experimenting. Sunderland were 1-0 up in the game and I put 10 on them to win at something like 1.59 (Ill explain these prices later). As the game progressed and the minutes ticked by, I noticed that the Sunderland price was falling. It was at this moment my wife announced that she was ready to go out! Sunderlands price was now around 1.45. I didnt know what to do, but decided to lay them at 1.46. After doing this I realised that I was going to win 1.30 if Sunderland won, and lose nothing if it ended a draw or a Reading win. This got me very interested. Needless to say, that afternoon my mind was not on the shopping but on how I could get what I had found to work for me.