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SPREAD BETTING at BETFAIR

SPREAD BETTING at BETFAIR by Dave Farrar of Betfair

The Premier League Points market on Betfair

For those who aren’t satisfied with simply trying to pick the winner of the 2009/2010 Premier League and want to make things a little more specific, there are always opportunities in Betfair’s spread betting markets.

With the outright market dominated by five clubs, the Premier League Points and Finishing Position markets allow you to take an opinion on any club in the Premier League, and give you a chance to trade in or out of a position at any stage of the season. These markets are all about over and under-performing, and with so much interest focussed on the top five, there have to be chances to be snapped up lower down.

Fulham would have been a good example last season of an excellent finishing position sell (the higher up they finished the better for you as a seller), and points buy (as a buyer the more points they got the better for you). Even though they wouldn’t have paid out in the outright market, you were well rewarded for predicting that they would perform better than expected.

The keys this season will be to work out who will be this year’s Fulham, and who will be its Newcastle United. Spread or range betting markets always seem complicated, but they’re actually pretty simple once you get your head round them.

If you buy a team’s points at 81, and they end up with 90, you make a nine point profit on your initial stake. If they end up with 70, then you make an eleven point loss. Throughout the Premier League season, you’ll be able to place range bets on both number of goals and corners in individual Premier League games.

Over 90 minutes, these will be a lot more volatile than season-long bets: if this is your first go at spread betting, start off with the longer term, less risky season-long bets. But if you do play 90 minute spread markets, don’t blindly buy in the hope that things will happen. More often than not, it’s better to go against your optimistic instinct, and sell. It’s more common for nothing to happen in football matches than highlights programmes lead you to believe.

The 2009-10 Premier League points market

There are subtleties in the points market that can’t really be factored into the outrights. Manchester United are favourites, with their points available to buy at 83, and to sell at 81. Given that United won the title with 90 points last season, you may see this as a buying opportunity, but given that a stronger challenge is likely to come from Liverpool and Chelsea in particular (not to mention Manchester City), 83 would be a brave buy.

Chelsea are rated to gather as many points as they did last year and are also available to buy at 83. Rather surprisingly, you can buy Liverpool points at 81. They got 86 last season. At the other end of the table, Wolves’ points can be bought at 37, with Birmingham and Burnley available to buy at 36 and 33 respectively. Hull are rated as the third worst team in the Premier League, and you can buy their points at 35.

The fixture list

In the early days of spread betting, one way to make some profit, at least by trading, was always to have a close look at the fixture list and take a short, rather than long term view. You might look at Arsenal’s first six fixtures and decide they are certain to drop at least eight points given their opposition, making their pre-season points total of 75 an initial sell, with an instant chance to then buy at a higher price. All well and good, but if they win all six you’ll struggle to get out of a very precarious position.

This therefore has always been a policy fraught with danger. By all means have a look at the fixture list, but judge how well you think a team will do over the course of a season and not try to get too cute in defining form over short runs of games. This approach can go wrong very quickly.

Top Tip

An opinion on Manchester City is where any analysis of points totals needs to start: if they challenge for the title then obviously they will be a buy at 67, and that performance will have an effect on the points totals of the rest of the top four, making them potential sells. I am not convinced that City will have the instant impact that many seem to expect. They have acquired some very good players, but unlike, say, Blackburn Rovers all of those years ago, there has been a rather disjointed nature to their recruitment.

They haven’t signed an Alan Shearer or even Chris Sutton equivalent, and there will be some tough personalities for an as yet unproven (Hughes is no Dalglish) manager to control.

If City underperform, then there’ll be a cheap points buy elsewhere amongst the top teams, and my focus will be on Liverpool. Everton are another side which regularly does better than expected, and further down the table, admirers of Steve Bruce will be interested to see Sunderland predicted to struggle again. Bruce, with a bigger budget than he ever had at Wigan or Birmingham, surely won’t let too many people down.