Up next in the Betfair Exchange series, we look at the process of placing a back bet on the Exchange.

Placing a back bet is what we do on traditional bookmakers, but doing so on the Betfair Exchange offers a number of advantages. You can find better odds on offer frequently, or even request odds.

However, the process behind placing these bets does differ slightly from other online bookmakers.

Placing a Back Bet on the Betfair Exchange

When going onto the Betfair Exchange Horse Racing page you’re welcomed by a screen like this. From here you can navigate to your races or even change sports to bet in anything from Football to Tennis to Golf, and much more.

When placing a back bet, the columns we’re interested in are the blue ones.

To explain things in this guide, let’s say we want to place a bet on the 4.30pm at Sandown. Click on the race in the Horse Racing Schedule and you will be taken to the above screen where you can find odds for the horses in the race and indeed many different markets.

We want to back Tukhoom to win, so we scroll down to him and look at the blue column.

Odds of 4.5 are on offer. The figure below the price (£63) is the amount of money currently available at that price. This means that you can bet up to £63 before your money will start going unmatched.

If we’re happy with this price, click the blue button, enter your stake, click Place Bet. That’s it. Done!

However, if we’re not happy with the odds of 4.5, or want to bet more money than is currently available, there are a couple of options we have.

1. If we want to bet a bigger stake click the Market Depth button in settings section to see liquidity at other odds. In this case, you can see that a further £25 is ready to be matched at odds of 4.4.
2. If we want to get better odds (as we all do!) we can request them by changing the Odds field after adding a selection to your betslip. In this instance, we are leaving our stake at odds of 5.0 for Tukhoom, and upon placing that bet we then have to wait for a layer to come and take us up on that offer and match the bet.

Remember, however, the bet at higher odds won’t always get matched. There simply isn’t anyone on the other side willing to accept the requested odds on occasions so make sure you know exactly what has been matched and what’s outstanding to avoid a bet landing and a part of your stake still sitting there unmatched!

More in this series:

What is the Betfair Exchange?
Back and Lay Betting Explained
Advantages of Using the Exchange