Outplayed Pro
The Extra Place Master is available exclusively to members on the Outplayed Pro tier. Click the button below to learn more about Outplayed Pro and the amazing tools it has to offer:
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Introduction
Outplayed’s Extra Place Master is an advanced matched betting tool that helps members maximise profits from horse racing extra place offers. The Extra Place Master helps users quickly find low cost matches for extra place each way bets, and calculates the stakes required for each stage of the backing and laying process.
For years, the gold standard for extra place offers has been to use implied odds as an indication of value. If your implied odds are 20, then as long as you land in the extra place at least once out of every 20 attempts, you will at least break even.
The problem is this does not give any consideration to how likely it is that your horse will achieve that result. A heavy odds on favourite or a distant outsider might only land in the extra place once in 100 attempts or less. This is clearly not value.
Furthermore, other horses might land in the extra place with much higher frequency, despite their implied odds not being as high. This represents an enormous amount of potential value.
The new software is able to simulate the actual probability of a horse landing in that extra place. It does this using our proprietary algorithm which analyses every participant in the race and the composition of the race to be able to very accurately approximate how likely a horse is to land in that extra place. The result is we are now able to determine with a high degree of accuracy whether a bet is plus or minus EV (worth doing or not).
The new software gives you the actual value of your bets, and unlike other software, actually factors in the composition of each individual race (every horse's odds relative to every other horse's odds in the race are all taken into account).
Using The Software
The Extra Place Master has three main modes:
Full Lay - For laying the Win and the Place part of the bet. You will be in profit if your horse finishes in the extra place.
Part Lay - For laying the Win part of the bet but not the Place. You will be in profit if your horse places.
No Lay - For laying nothing. You will have a large profit if your horse wins and often be in profit if your horse places.
The Part Lay and No Lay modes will have additional value compared to Full Lay and are especially useful when the exchange markets aren't well formed. Bear in mind that that they are much higher variance than Full Lay and you will have larger positive/negative swings in profits. These modes are for advanced value bettors only and will require a large bankroll.
No Lay mode will show horses that aren't necessarily extra places, but still represent value.
Full Lay Mode
When you first open the Extra Place Master you will be seeing results for all extra place races for that day.
To view other races simply select a racecourse and then the race time:
In the main results section you will see that the display is split into columns with the selection in rows:
Horse Name - The name of the horse you're betting on.
Race - The race that this horse is racing in.
EV% - The Expected Value of the selection. In simple terms this is a rating of how much value there is per £100 staked (£50 Each Way). For example a 116.3% EV means that the value of a £100 total stake (£50 Each Way) would be £16.30.
Simply put, if the EV% is above 100% then it's a profitable bet. If it's under 100% then it's not profitable.
You can read more about EV in the "Why Is EV Important?" section further down this page.
EP Chance - The % chance of your horse finishing in the extra place. For example in the above screenshot the bookie is paying 4 places whilst the exchange is 3 places. Our EP chance is 6.9% which means there is a 6.9% chance that Love Interest comes in 4th place.
IO - Implied Odds: A measure of how good your qualifying loss is compared to the potential extra place payout. This was previously widely used to gauge if a selection had good value or not. It is now better to base your selections on EV% rather than IO.
B. Odds - The bookie back odds.
Ex. Win Odds - The exchange Win lay odds.
Ex. Place Odds - The exchange Place lay odds.
Exchange - Which exchange we're using (e.g. Matchbook in the example above). Clicking on the exchange logo will take you directly to the market page.
Bookie Terms - This shows the number of places being paid by the bookie, and in brackets the place terms. The place terms show you, displayed as a fraction, what the place payout ratio is in comparison to the win part of the bet (e.g. 1/5 odds means the bookie pays one fifth of the win odds for the place part of the bookie bet).
Bookie - The bookmaker used for this selection. Clicking on the bookie logo will take you directly to the market page.
Clicking on the horse name will show the odds and details for the same horse with different exchanges:
Filters
The filters can be found at the top of the software.
Hovering over one of these options will then allow you to change what shows up in the software. For example the following will cause the software to only show selections with an EV% of 100% or higher after you click Apply.
Clicking Clear Filters at the top right will set all filters back to the default.
The Save/Load Filter button allows you to save the current filter settings you have, then load this filter back in whenever you like.
Odds Refresh
You can manually refresh all of the results by clicking the Refresh button at the top right:
If you'd rather the results automatically refreshed then you can click the Auto button:
Clicking this again will pause the automatic refreshing.
To change the time interval between refreshes, click the Settings button and enter your preferred time in seconds (30 is the minimum):
Calculator / My Bets
Clicking on the small calculator icon next to the horse name will bring up the calculator:
The number next to the horse name is the value of your bet. In this example a £10 Each Way bet is worth £3.26 in theoretical long term value.
Clicking the Exchange dropdown or bookie dropdown will show the other exchange/bookie options available, then automatically adjust the calculator figures if the odds are different.
If you amend any of the figures in the calculator, it will automatically recalculate everything for you.
Clicking Store will save your bet to the My Bets section of the Extra Place Master. This section will show all of the bets you've stored and all the useful information you need about them.
The My Bets section also has access to a very handy graph to show how your profits tally up with the value taken.
Removing Horses
If you want to ensure that a specific horse no longer shows on the software, you can click the X next to the bookie:
If you wish to restore these horses, hover over the Removed Horses filter, then select the horse(s) you want to restore, then click Delete.
Commission Rates
If you wish to customise the exchange commission rates used by the Extra Place Master the you can do this via the "My Account" section of the website. Simply enter the commission rates you wish to use and select "Save Exchange Rates". This will then apply these percentages, not only to the Extra Place Master, but also to all of the other tools on Outplayed. The majority of the time these changes should be reflected instantly but you may, on occasion, need to wait a couple of seconds/refresh your web browser.
No Lay Mode
WARNING: This mode is for advanced value bettors only. You will need a large bankroll due to the big swings in profit/loss.
Always make sure to check that the bookmaker is still paying the number of places shown by the software.
The layout is very similar to the Full Lay mode except for five differing columns:
BEO - The Break Even Odds. The bookmaker odds that would give exactly £0 value on this horse. This is a very useful metric to see how far the bookmaker odds can get cut and the bet to still be profitable. In this example the Break Even Odds are 51.6 which means any odds above 51.6 are +EV and profitable long term.
F Win - The fair win odds. The odds that represent the actual chance of the horse winning the race. In the example above this is 74.29, which means a 1 in 74.29 chance that the horse wins.
F Place - The fair place odds. The odds that represent the actual chance of the horse placing in the race. In this example above this is 10.46, which means a 1 in 10.46 chance that the horse places.
Win EV - The EV from the win part of the bet. For example with a £100 Each Way bet with the example above (90.2% Win EV), the £100 win part of the bet would have a value of -£9.80 in the long run.
Place EV - The EV from the place part of the bet. For example with a £100 Each Way bet with the example above (167.3% Place EV), the £100 place part of the bet would have a value of £67.30 in the long run.
The most important thing though, as always, is the main EV% (which is 128.7% in this example).
Click here to learn more about bankroll and stake sizing for No Lay Extra Place betting.
Why Is EV Important?
Extra Place betting is all about taking a selection that has value. We want to be betting on the horses that are +EV (have a positive Expected Value) and avoiding horses that are -EV (negative Expected Value).
Our new Extra Place Master software will now provide the Expected Value for each horse meaning you can take the perfect profitable opportunities and massively increase your profits. This means no more stressing over what makes a good Extra Place bet - the software shows you exactly what you’re after.
Let’s rewind a little and talk about what Expected Value really means. Expected Value isn't the profit we expect to get every time - because of course sometimes your horse will finish in the extra place and you’ll get a huge win, and sometimes your horse won’t finish in the extra place and you’ll have a small qualifying loss. The result varies race by race.
Expected Value is the profit we expect to get on average if our horse ran the race an infinite number of different times. So you can see that this is key in telling us if a horse is worth betting on or not, and exactly how profitable it’ll be in the long run. Our software will reveal the horses with the best Expected Value over all races.
Ignoring horses for a minute - how do we work out the Expected Value of an event?
Generally speaking, the value of something is the chance of each eventuality, multiplied by your profit/loss if that event does happen, then add up all the possible scenarios. That might sound complicated but it’s really simple.
Let’s say that your friend flips a coin, traps it between their hands, and says to you - “I’ll give you £5 if this is heads, but you owe me £5 if it isn’t.”
You have the following possible outcomes:
Outcome | Probability of Happening | Your Profit/Loss |
HEADS | 50% | + £5 |
TAILS | 50% | - £5 |
50% of the time you’ll be up £5. 50% of the time you’ll be down £5. Sounds like a fair game, but let’s just confirm it by working out the EV (Expected Value).
EV = (Chance of Heads x Profit if Heads) + (Chance of Tails x Profit if Tails)
= (50% x £5) + (50% x -£5)
= £2.50 - £2.50
= £0
So in this game we have an EV of £0. This means that in the long run, if we played this game over and over again, we wouldn’t lose any money (or gain any money either). Sometimes you’d win £5, sometimes your friend wins £5. Since the reward is equal and the probability is also equal, it all cancels itself out in the long run.
It’s a completely fair game where you have no edge over your friend, and your friend has no edge over you. This is no good for us - we’re here to make money and we want the edge. So it’s time to get on the events that give us a big positive EV. I’m talking about placing Extra Place bets on the right horses in the right races.
Now we’ll get right into an Extra Place bet example.
You’ve just placed an Each Way bet on the horse Redrum in a race offering 4 places instead of the standard 3.
Your qualifying loss is £5 and your final position if Redrum finishes in 4th place (the extra place) is a £175 profit.
Small tangent: I know some of you will be used to using Implied Odds as a metric for Extra Place betting and after a small bit of maths know that this bet has Implied Odds of 36.0 (35 to 1). That’s all well and good, but what does having Implied Odds of 36.0 really tell us about the value of our bet? Well not nearly as much as we’d really like to know. It literally just tells us that we’d win £35 for each £1 of qualifying loss (we already knew that anyway!). It doesn’t tell us if the bet has good value or not!
We want to do better than that.. So just like before, we’ll make a table of the possible outcomes:
Outcome | Probability of Happening | Your Profit/Loss |
Redrum Finishes 4th | ??? | + £175 |
Redrum Doesn't Finish 4th | ??? | - £5 |
You’re stuck.. You can’t work out the EV (the real value that you have from placing the bet), without knowing how likely Redrum is to finish 4th. Without this information you don’t even know if placing this bet makes you money in the long run, let alone how much!
You don’t know this probability.. But our software does.
It takes all the factors it needs (the odds, the runners, the type of race etc.) to determine the chance of each horse finishing in each relevant place.
Let’s do the table again but with the probabilities filled in thanks to the advanced Extra Place Master:
Friendly Reminder - You don't ever need to be working out any of this maths yourself. The software will do everything for you and clearly display the EV of each horse in every race.
Outcome | Probability of Happening | Your Profit/Loss |
Redrum Finishes 4th | 15% | + £175 |
Redrum Doesn't Finish 4th | 85% | - £5 |
15% of the time you’ll be up £175. 85% of the time you’ll be down £5.
EV = (Chance of 4th x Profit if 4th) + (Chance of Not 4th x Profit if Not 4th)
= (15% x £175) + (85% x -£5)
= £26.25 - £4.25
= £22
Result! This value is positive and that means our Each Way bet on Redrum has a value of £22. All thanks to knowing the horse’s chance of finishing in the extra place - this was the crucial information.
To be able to quickly see the value of each horse allows you to never miss the best Extra Place selections.