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World Snooker Championship Betting: Guide to frame betting

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Many punters are eyeing up Betfair's 'next frame' markets, where apparently there is easy money to be made. But is it, as is often the case with betting systems, too good to be true? Jack Houghton investigates.

There are still four days to go until the World Championships get under way in Sheffield (10am, Saturday 19th April) and it's already happened. Every year about this time I have my first of many conversations about Betfair's Next Frame markets and how someone has worked out a system that guarantees regular profit.

For those unfamiliar with Next Frame markets, they allow punters to bet on who will win the next frame in a match. What makes them exciting is that the markets are turned in-play, creating some of the most rapid and volatile price swings seen on the exchange, as bets are struck right up until the frame is concluded.

This volatility leads many punters to think that by simply offering to lay both players at a predefined price as every frame gets underway, you would make a long-term profit. For example, you might decide to lay both players at 1.8 for £100. If both bets are matched, you are guaranteed to win £20, no matter which player eventually takes the frame. The occasions where you are unable to get both players matched will lose you £80, but, the theory goes, these losses are more than covered in the innumerable £20s you will be picking up.

I first became aware of this theory when reading an article by Paul Kealy published in the Definitive Guide to Betting Exchanges. I should start by saying that the article is excellent and should be required reading for any in-play snooker punter. But in it, Kealy says: "I am 99.9 per cent certain that if you put up [1.5] for either player in every frame you will find yourself matched on both sides more than enough times to cover for the times you are not." And it is most likely to be this statement that created the belief that there is easy money to be made in Next Frame markets.

So is it true? Well, it doesn't look like it. I gathered data from 577 World Championship Next Frame markets, recording the lowest price matched (to a £100 stake) on each player. If you had bet £100 stakes on the arbitrary advice above, you would have lost £4,950 over the course of the 577 frames, without even taking into account commission payments.

It is only by offering very short prices that you get close to profit. Laying both players at 1.01 returned a £23 profit and 1.02 a £46 profit. But again, these profits would have been eroded by commission payments and are based on events that happen infrequently enough to make them statistically unreliable (in only six of the 577 frames were both players matched at 1.01).

Having done the analysis, it becomes clear why such a straightforward approach fails to return a profit. Take the first round match up of Ronnie O'Sullivan and Liu Chang in this year's Championship. O'Sullivan is likely to start each frame at around [1.15] favourite to win it. If you had followed the system and arbitrarily offered a bigger price then you would, of course, return a loss in the long-run.

It's clear then that if there is to be a system that returns a guaranteed profit, it needs to be more sophisticated than what we see above. Perhaps trying to lay each player at a certain percentage under their starting price is the way to go. If you have two players trading at [1.7] and [2.26] as the frame starts, perhaps offering to lay them at [1.6] and [2.0] respectively would return the desired profit? Unfortunately, I don't know, because it's just impossible to extract the answers from the data I have.

What is clear though, and what Kealy explains so well in his article, is that the volatility of these markets makes them ripe for shrewd operators to profit. The antithesis is of course also true: a less than shrewd approach can massacre an otherwise well-tended betting bank. But what does shrewd look like in this instance?

Well, it's probably got something to do with not overreacting to a player who starts to make a break. As Kealy says, there is a common, and growing, misconception that snooker frames are won in one visit. They're generally not.

I personally blame snooker commentators - especially Willie Thorne - for propagating this myth. Constant talk about "one-visit snooker" and predictions of a "frame-winning opportunity" create the impression of a general standard of professional snooker way above its true norm.

Kealy relays an instance where Matthew Stevens, playing Stephen Hendry, was offered at just [1.25] having potted an opening red - a gross misunderstanding of his true chance of going on to win the frame.

So although an easy system may not exist to profit from Betfair's Next Frame markets, there certainly are opportunities to make money - assuming you can resist the overreactions of the majority of punters.