French Open Tips: How to profit from trading the early rounds at Roland Garros

• Learn how to trrade on the early rounds of the French Open

• Win even when backing a hotpot to lose

• Cash out for in-play profit

Seeding in Grand Slam Tennis tournaments means that the highest ranking players will face much lower ranked players in the earlier rounds.

This means you will see some very short odds to win these early round matches at the French Open. We know that the odds in a betting market are generally efficient, so a player at odds of 1.031/33 has a 97% of winning a match.

If you want to make money betting, you want to bet on something that is going to win. So I'm going to give you a spoiler here, Iga Swiatek, priced at 1.031/33 won the match we mention.

What would you have done? You would back her to win! But in this match, I bet on Swiatek to lose and still won.

So how was that possible?

Trading Tennis gives you more chance to profit

One of the great things about tennis is that it can be highly variable and that makes it perfect for Betfair trading.

When betting you must work out which player is going to win. When trading, you don't need to do that. This is because the way the odds move will present you with many chances to cash out for a profit in-play.

The essence of trading is not whether the price is efficient at the start or during the match. It's what happens during the actual match itself.

To open this trade I laid £3333 at 1.03 on Swaitek. That meant if she went on to win I would lose £100, but if she lost I would win £3333.

What happened in the match?

During the match, Swiatek's opponent served first, broke the Swiatek serve early in the set, and raced into a 4-2 lead.

Despite starting as the heavy odds on favourite, Swiatek's odds moved from 1.021/50 to 1.152/13. This meant that for a £100 risk, we netted a profit just short of £400 if Swiatek went on to win, or a cashout of £340 to win whatever the result in the match.

We won despite betting on Swiatek to lose!

How this works, and why

The best way to describe why trading in a Tennis match works is to use a metaphor.

If you had to bet on a coin you would be betting on whether it lands on heads of tails. The way you make money is to be better at guessing whether it will land on either.

When you trade you are profiting from the variability in the Tennis match. If this were a coin toss, you are betting on how many times the coin flips from head to tails as it spins through the air on the way to landing on either heads or tails.

Trading is all about betting on the variability of the potential outcome of a match, rather than result itself.

The more entertaining and variable the match, the better it is to trade!

How do we know where to exit a trade?

If you are a Bet Angel user that's an easy question to answer. If you start up Tennis trader before the start of a match, it will tell you where the odds are likely to be given any particular score line. This will allow you to decide roughly where you would like to either open a trading position or decide to cash out.

In this case a break or double break would put Swiatek's odds around 1.152/13 to 1.171/6 so that was the best place to exit.

How often does this happen?

The remarkable thing is that even when you look at very short odds, in this case, odds of 1.021/50. About 70% of the time, you will see the price of the heavy odds-on favourite drift during a tennis match.

Of course, there are situations where it doesn't occur, and you'll have to take that loss. But the opportunity to profit from trading arises much more frequently than you would expect.

Summary

Regardless of where players' odds start in a tennis match, they can meander throughout the match.

That presents the opportunity to profit from trading the match. We don't try to pick a winner; we're more interested in that variability that we see during the match.

With very short odds favourites, we like to go in and lay those because the downside is limited but the upside is large. The opposite is true if you back at these odds.

Our exit point is when a player has or nearly has their serve broken. There we can net a profit regardless of what happens from that point onwards.

Tools like Tennis trader will tell you where you should exit in a match.

This is what I will be doing in early rounds of the French Open.