How Do Bookies Lay Off Bets
- A perfect book, without factoring in a margin for the bookie, would mean the implied probability of all outcomes would add up to 100%. However, bookies use the concept of overround to stretch this probability greater than 100%.
- Lay bets can only be placed at a Betting Exchange. For an exchange to place, there have to be people willing to back at the odds you want to lay at. If no one is backing the event you can’t match a bet.
Balancing The Book. The actual term ‘bookmaker‘ simply comes from the practice of laying bets, and more specifically, the recording of these bets in a ledger or book, hence ‘making a book’. When making a book, the bookie is simply laying. Lay betting is betting against a result. If you look at any online bookmaker, they are laying every single bet on their site. It is then up to the punter to decide whether they think a certain outcome will happen,.
The main purpose of placing a wager on a game or event is to win money. That is what drives the industry and it’s what has both amateur and pro bettors competing amongst themselves to prove who the best handicapper is. If you ever find yourself placing a bet with the expectation of losing, you are in the wrong business. Whether you can believe it or not, sportsbook place bets from time to time with the expectation losing in order to secure a profit. This term is called the “layoff”
What Does Layoff Mean?
If you ever hear the term “layoff” while lingering around a sportsbook, you should consider yourself lucky and find a way to take advantage of the situation. A “layoff” refers to a bookmaker that places a wager with another bookmaker in order to help reduce the liability on a certain game or to simply balance out the action. The easiest way I can help you understand this is with an example. The Monday night football game between the New England Patriots and the host Dallas Cowboys has turned out to be a hot gameand a specific sportsbook has taken a massive amount of action – both number of bets and dollar amount – on the home team. If the home team (Cowboys) were to cover the spread then the book would lose a lot of money on that game. To assure that this isn’t the case, the sportsbook will try to minimize their risk as much as possible by placing a bet at another sportsbook on the Cowboys. That way, if the Cowboys do happen to cover, they will have the winnings from their own bet to cover some of the losses at their own sportsbook. If by chance the Patriots happen to cover the spread, they would profit large from all the action they took at their own facility, which would cover their own lost bet. In short, this is basically a way sportsbook’s cover their butts.
How to Spot the Layoff Spots
Make no mistakes about it. Layoff spots are nearly impossible to spot. The sportsbook will always have the upper hand in terms of sports betting, so they must never act like they are in a vulnerable position to the betting public. A line that books are scared of is a line that bettors should be aware of and take advantage of, but that information is not made public and is very rarely figured out.
What to do When You Find a Layoff Spot
If you happen to be at the right place at the right time and are lucky enough to stumble across this lucky word, I would advise you to double or triple check the source and figure out why this L word is being thrown around. Most games have balanced action which is why the sportsbooks never go broke. If you come across a game where one side is getting all of the play, you may want to take a step back and decide if you want to be part of the public slaughter that usually always happens. Sportsbooks trust their linemakers and they trust them enough to know they won’t ever put out a bad line which would hurt the business. If a sportsbook is scared, the line may be soft enough for you to take advantage of it and turn out a profit, however I recommend using caution when doing so.
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How do Bookies Balance Bets?If you are just starting as a bookie or if you are already an established bookie with numerous players that bet with you then you will all but definitely be using a pay per head website to book your action.
Sure you could be using paper and pen and taking wagers thru text and a phone call from your players but this is a ton of work and there is no way you would possibly be able to offer anywhere near the amount of wagering options that a PPH service could.
These services provide you with a website with updated up to the second odds on thousands of sporting events and props every day. They take care of all the technical aspects of the lines so that you as the bookie can focus on acquiring more players and managing your payments and collections with your players.
One question that often comes up with bookies is how they go about balancing the bets they receive. The easy answer is that if a bookie wants to balance their book then they would need to have a personal account where they would be able to make bets themselves. So for example, if a bookie has 10k on the Patriots and only 2k on the opposing side, that means they are exposed 8k on the Patriots, and if they wanted to layoff or hedge some of the 8k risk they could bet a certain amount on the opposing team.
However, it must be acknowledged that having a balanced book is not something that is going to be that common, because to successfully have that you would need to have thousands of players betting with you and even if you had that many players the public still generally bets the favorites in most games in a lopsided amount.
Why Do Bookmakers Lay Off Bets
So even though in theory it would be nice to always have a balanced book and just collect the juice and not have any risk, this is not something that in reality can be achieved all the time, unless you are constantly laying off action. However the whole premise of being a bookie is to take risks, and the bookies that make the most money are not the ones that layoff action, but are the ones that instead leave their book unbalanced and take the risk that the public will be wrong more cases than not, which over the long term is what happens in this industry.
But if you are truly worried about the risk of having an unbalanced book and laying off at least part of the action, then using a pay per head service such as AcePerHead.com is the perfect service to use because they have a wager alert feature that you can set on your account.
How To Lay Off A Bet
This feature allows the bookie to either place a phone number or email so they can receive bets based on the parameters they set. So, for example, you can set up an alert to get every bet from every player or you can set it to just get alerts on certain wagers over a certain amount and on specific players. Then using these alerts the bookie can lay off bets on his personal betting account. Or a bookie can use Ace’s exposure report and see a detailed report of how much action the bookie has on each game and he can then use that information to determine if he wants to