How to Lay a Bet at Betfair
Laying a bet at Betfair is very simple. First you have to find the event you want to bet on:
Here we've gone All Markets -> Soccer -> English Soccer -> Barclays Premiership -> Fixtures 12 November -> Arsenal v Liverpool. You can also search for the event in the search box beneath the Betfair logo. The next thing to do is look at the "market".
We're interested in the pink boxes - this is where we lay our bet. You can see that if we lay Arsenal to win, our odds will be 2.12. If we lay Liverpool to win, they'd be 4.4. If we lay the draw our odds are 3.4. These are the lay odds. Beneath the lay odds is a sum of money - this shows how much money is "unmatched" for that lay. It's called liquidity. If we want to place a lay stake of £25, you can see that no matter which option we choose, there's more than £25 liquidity so we'll be fine. If we wanted to place a lay stake on Arsenal we could do so all the way up to £41057! This is why football is so good to bet on - it's a very popular sport and there's almost always enough liquidity to cover your lay. If you tried to bet on the Mexico City 3rd Division Chess Championships you'd have a hard time finding a game with enough liquidity to cover your lay.
All you do is click on the pink box next to the event you want, enter your lay stake and click confirm. You just laid a bet! Note that if you don't have enough money in your Betfair account to cover your liability (your lay stake x your lay odds) then you won't be allowed to make the lay.
All done! To return to the step by step guide click here.