What is Dobbing?
Dobbing stands for double or bust and is one of a number of sports trading / betting strategies that you primarily use in-play. You place a trade before the off and ‘keep’ the closing position through the in-play period and that’s how most people do it.
You profit with dobbing because of the price movement between when you place the bet pre-off, to when odds get matched inplay. As something becomes more certain inplay or the time descreases to the end of an event, you profit from that differential.
Dobbing is a great strategy to use on horse racing, as you have many races and there is a nice mixture of pre-off and in-play liquidity. But it can be used by sports traders on pretty much any sport that has the correct characteristics.
It’s not that different from a normal trade on Betfair, but the nature of the way you deploy this sports betting strategy makes it really easy to understand what your objective is when you should use it and what would make this a profitable Betfair trading strategy.
So how do you do a dobbing trade?
How to prepare Dobbing on Bet Angel
We are going to use global settings here and offset with greening, meaning when we place a position in the market Bet Angel will offset it in a profitable position, but in a position that’s completely hedged across the entire market.
We’re not going to use tick’s on this occasion, but we are going to use a percentage and if we want to DOB we select an offset of 50%.
For this particular example we’re gonna use a fixed stake in. Before we move on, make sure you’ve got global settings on the ladder. To do this make sure the ‘cog’ icon on the ladder doesn’t not have a cross through it.
If we put the first bet into the market then Bet Angel will offset that particular bet by 50%. So in this example in the video, we’ve gone in at 3.10 and Bet Angel has offset the bet and you can see it’s a DOB position at 1.55. It’s going to double or bust on this particular occasion. So to carry this in play we need to keep this bet.
Keeping the bet means that it gets carried over from pre-off to in-play.
Trading Dobbing in-play
On the next image, we’ve rejoined this race just as the race has got underway.
At the moment we are heading in around 2.6 and towards that general direction. It’s only a 1m2f race, so it is ten furlongs and most of the activity tends to take place towards the end of a race.
So when a race starts, you can’t really read much into that, to be honest. We will just have to sit and wait until probably the last three furlongs to see if this order actually gets matched at this particular price.
As I watched the race in play Shankara was leading from the front and was reasonably well positioned at the six-furlong marker. So the market obviously liked where this horse is positioned as long as it doesn’t get boxed in as it comes around that last corner.
It’s looking fairly comfortable at the moment, however, it is too early to tell in this particular race. However, number five was getting jigged along a little bit and so the price has gone out for Shankara in response to that.
Now Shankara is in third at the moment and is going wide to attack down the outside with plenty of room.
And we’ve been matched! So we went in with a £10 stake, we offset it by 50%, Dobbing it (double or bust) and you can see that we’ve made a £10 profit regardless of who goes on to win this race.
Shankara looked like they were going to get it, but in fact i twas Falcon Cliffs that managed to hold on the far side rail while Shankara finished third as the race came to an end.
So despite the fact that Shankar didn’t win, he managed to double our money. That is one way Dobbing can make you money, even when the favourite doesn’t win!
I hope this helped you understand how Dobbing can work and I hope this strategy works well for you.
