LAY BACK WITH BETFAIR: LAY BETTING

Shane Ciurleo: I [was] always sort of involved in racing one way or another, as a small shareholder, and just [a] wagering enthusiast as a young fellow growing up and playing footy, then I moved to Toowoomba 9 or 10 years ago and that’s when I started getting into more full time, discovered that they have about eight or nine jump outs every morning with six or seven horses per jump out that weren’t televised and the market didn’t know what was going on and was having a few bets off the back of that and after a little bit of time doing that, I thought I could do this full time and that was five years ago or so now and just enjoyed the journey and discovering the pitfalls and everything else that goes with it along the way.

Shane Ciurleo: Lay betting is one part of it, in-play betting is another part of it. It’s just the complete tool. Using it for information as well because there’s some good market intelligence that you can follow by using Betfair and using Betfair live. It’s just the complete tool for me, I couldn’t sort-of operate without it.

Shane Ciurleo: Yeah, I frame my own markets, and there’s a fair bit that goes into that, obviously the data, but then we have things like SpeedMap and we have a little bit of market that we apply to as well.

Shane Ciurleo: It certainly re-invented it and I had to re-invent it because your edge is always eroding. When you first start out betting, you’ve got access to more sort of corporate accounts, bookmaking accounts and as we know when you start having a little bit of success, and that’s not necessarily just winning, that’s also just beating the market, you get restricted there pretty quickly.

You say ‘team believe your eye’ and then got introduced to data and I was able to quantify some of those performances where it looked like it might have been a good run and then I could quantify that by looking at the data to see if that backed up what your eye saw.

Shane Ciurleo: Obviously it’s just how much you want to lose on that runner winning, basically. There’s plenty of different ‘schools of thought’, there’s guys that do it completely different, I just do it to what is comfortable, really. It’s not really a mathematical equation for me, as a percentage of bank on this side of it. And this race is a great example of why I do that because I feel like I’ve got an edge in these races in Queensland and I’ve got to back myself and bet to it.

There’s a lot more smarter guys than me when it comes to data and analysis and that sort of thing. And there’s a lot better guys than me when it comes to working out staking and size of the bank and all that sort of stuff, but there’s a little bit of, not necessarily gut-feel, but intuition and confidence in what I’m doing to work that out.

I mean that liability there that we’re looking at on that example before, what’s the total liability for that race on that example, $700? You could go and have $700 on Read My Future and it runs second, now as it turns out it just got there in the end, but if you just use a normal bookmaker and you hated the favourite, so you wanted to back the second favourite and then the third favourite knocks you off and you get nothing out of the race, it’s just silly, and that’s why you got to use Betfair.

Shane Ciurleo: I do a little bit of in-play stuff. It’s a pretty competitive game, but if you go in there prepared with horses, with SpeedMap’s particularly, is what I do, so I’m doing a SpeedMap and then looking to bet. Sometimes you want to get a horse to land in a spot, like you’re hoping it gets there but you’re not quite sure, so you don’t want to bet pre-off, and then in-run if you see it land in the spot where you wanted it to be, you can tap away.