Lay The Field – Horse Racing Betfair Trading Strategy

The Laying The Field or “Lay All” method has to be one of the easiest horse racing trading strategies to learn for beginners, and was one which I remember filling me with excitement when I first learned about it and started trading with it many years ago.

This method seeks to profit from races with a close finish, ideally with as many horses as possible all driving forwards together for the nod on the line at the end of the race. These are the favourite races for any Lay The Field trader. I only wish I was laying the field on this one…..


Can you imagine how much money people were backing in that race, with so many horses all an inch or two away from winning?! More to the point, can you imagine how low the prices were on those horses?! But while there was probably a string of horses priced extremely low down near 1.01, only number 9 ‘Grassy’ was the declared winner!

So let’s imagine 6 gamblers in the bookies arguing over who won. 1 of them did, 5 didn’t. Imagine for a second if you were in that bookies, and instead of being one of the backers, you were the bookie behind the desk who owned the place! One winner, 5 losers. For each loser you (as the bookie) are a winner. So you are looking at five of those people thanking them for handing you their hard-earned money, and only one of them cost you anything. Not bad huh?

With Betfair and the Laying The Field method, you can take the role of the bookie. Of course races like that are incredibly rare, but profits can be made from carefully selected the right races and laying all runners in those races in the hope of a close finish.

This method has a lot of similarities to my Lay The Draw football method, the main one being that the method is fairly well-known, but not that well executed by many traders, hence the reason you will hear people saying “I tried that, it didn’t work”. I have lost count of how many methods I have heard people saying “doesn’t work” only to find they do work just fine, for some people. The difference is not the method but the person behind the wheel, the discipline, the trade selection criteria, the timing of the entry, the emotional control and so on. Also as with my lay the draw method, I have my own way of doing things, and this applies to Laying the Field as much as it does to LTD.

Laying The Field eBook

Some people think you can just apply the LTF method to every race, obviously that’s never going to work. Most people pick a few races based on one or two simple ‘filters’, then fire in their bets and check back later. Sometimes they do well, sometimes they don’t. But how hard were they trying? So how much profit did they really deserve?

My approach to thus method has some fairly unique benefits. I have a few tweaks on the method which makes it quite different to the bog standard approach. I also have some tweaks for those with software or those who want to try expanding into software at a later date. This can offer more opportunities, a way to avoid losses (improving strike rate) and generally allows you to grow your experience faster and expand into other horse racing methods. But don’t get me wrong, software is not necessary at all, it’s just another option some people may want to explore.

Above all my method takes into account as many factors as possible affecting your strike rate which gives you the means to fine tune and hone your edge until you are happy and successful with it. There is almost no limit to the number of ways you can play with your criteria and filters, as well as various different ways of actually trading your selections. These are all explained thoroughly in my Laying The Field eBook