Why Do Betfair Horse Traders Love Dobbing Strategies?

Why do Betfair horse racing traders love dobbing?

Because with dobbing, you don’t need the horse to win.

You only need the price to shorten enough in-running.

That one idea changes everything.

Instead of asking:

“Which horse will win?”

You start asking:

“Which horse is likely to trade shorter during the race?”

And for Betfair traders, that opens up a much smarter way to look at horse racing markets.

In this video, I explain how dobbing works, why traders love it, the common mistake beginners make, and what you should look for before placing a trade.

We’ll cover:

• What dobbing actually means
• Why you don’t need to pick the winner
• How backing and laying at half the price works
• Why running style and pace matter
• Why some horses are repeat dobbers
• The danger of turning dobbing into hope
• How data can help you find better trading setups

The key lesson?

Dobbing is not about guessing.

It’s about finding horses that are likely to shorten in-running often enough to give you a repeatable trading edge.

If you want to research horse racing strategies properly, check out LightSpeed Stats here:

https://lightspeedstats.com/signup/

Comment “DOB” below if you want a follow-up video showing a simple dobbing research process step by step.

🎯 Ready to trade smarter, not harder?
Start using the tools that real traders rely on — backtest strategies, spot value, and simplify your trading process.
👉 Visit LightSpeedStats.com and take your edge to the next level.

📩 Got a question or want to suggest a future topic?
Email Martin directly at info@lightspeedstats.com or connect via the forum.

💬 Leave a review.
If you enjoyed this episode, rate and review the show — it helps us reach more traders like you.

Transcript

Copy

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, welcome to another video from lightspeedstats.com, the home of Betfair Trading for Horse Racing Traders and the home of back testing your horse racing strategies. What we do, nobody else does. It's fantastic. Okay guys, today I'm going to talk about dubbing. Specifically, I'm going to talk about why Betfair horse racing traders absolutely love Dobbs. They love Dobb strategies. And then we're actually going to get into a Dobbs strategy ourselves, one that we actually send out in the daily email, and one that we're going to go through right now. And we give this out as an example strategy to new members as well. If they require a Dobbs strategy in particular, and if you are a member and you want to hold of this strategy, obviously just say the word DOBS in the comments and I will get that over to you. But more importantly, if you're a member or if you're not a member, we do have free strategies that we give away. If you want some free strategies, it's just on a Google Sheet. You will get that strategy now. Just say the word free in the comments, either the number or the word, whatever. We have three strategies. They're absolutely free. That's very confusing. But the point is, go and get it. Just say the word free in the comments, and I will send that over to you when I see that comment. Okay, guys, dubbing. Everyone seems to love it in horse racing circles. And why is that? Is it a strategy you should be looking at? Is it one you're already looking at and you just kind of want to know exactly why it's so popular? I think it starts with the fact that it's a very clean strategy. You don't need the horse to win, you don't need to predict how the full race goes, you don't even need to sit there sweating at the final fence. Oh, is it going to get over? Is it not? You just need the price to move enough in the direction you want it to, and that's it. You know, and when you break it down to those fundamentals, it becomes very, very simple, doesn't it? And I think again, that's something that really appeals to Betfare horse racing traders. Because I think dabbing is one of the most addictive horse racing strategies on Betfare. It's because it's so easy to utilize, it's so easy to do. Um and I will say, with a caveat to that, it's still very important, just because it's a simple strategy, it's still very important to have a good dabbing strategy, and we're going to get into that as I say in a little while. Um, because there's a bit of a catch here. Most people will say you don't need the horse to win and think lovely, easy money. But we're not just laying the horse outright, are we? We are backing to lay. We're backing a horse at higher odds in a dob, hoping that the odds have, and then we're laying off and we're taking the profit. So we either take 100% profit or 100% loss. So if we're betting £10, I'm going to use £10 stakes for this strategy example in a minute, so we'll use that for this idea kind of analogy is that if you're betting £10, if your trade wins, you win £10, and if your trade loses, you lose £10. Okay? But if your price does get hit in the race, you get £10 profit on your horse, £10 profit on every other horse, and you're laughing all the way to the bank because essentially you can just sit there for the rest of the race knowing that you've made your profit. Obviously, minus commission, which by the way, the software that I'm going to show you does take um commission into account. So the profits you will see are all post-commission, which again is brilliant. Um, but yeah, so you've got to be a little bit careful with Dobbs. You want to make sure you've still got a good strategy. Now, if you're horse, if you're new to horse racing trading, Dobbing might sound like some sort of strange playground insult, and I get that you might not know fully what it is, but it's actually one of the most popular trading methods on Betfair on the Betfare Exchange completely. Okay, Dobb stands for double or bust. The basic idea is you back a horse at one price, then you lay it off at half the price, as I've said. So I'll give you an example here. Let's say you back a horse at 10.0, you're effectively going to be looking to lay it off at the price that nets you 100% profit, which I believe is 5.0. I need to go through on BetFair to be 100% sure. But the good thing is when you're using BetFair, and I've done strategy videos on this, so if you want to watch those, just go back through the Light Speed Stats YouTube channel, and they will be on there. And by the way, guys, subscribe to the channel. We're a new channel, right? This is new, and we're kind of trying to boost it out. We've been using the Betfair trading community channel, but this one we want to get going because the hook football and horses are different, and I know a lot of you guys are either football traders or horse racing traders. Obviously, most of you watching this are going to be horse racing traders, so we want to kind of separate that out a bit so that you know you're not bombarded with football stuff if you're not interested in it. Um, but yeah, and then if you can lay off at 5.0 or whatever it is to get the dub, um, then you will make the profit. And again, think of it in decimal as you might back at 6.0, then lay off at 3.0. Okay, and the trick is that if you're betting £10 right at the higher price, you're actually laying £20 at the lower price, with the idea being that obviously if it loses, you win £10 on your lay because you've laid £20, but if it wins, you still make £10 because you've got such a high price on that £10 back that even when you minus that £20, you still get your 100% profit on the trade. Um, so if the horse hits that price in running, you lock in your position, and it will do it. You can set that up automatically pre-race. Again, I've done example videos on this, so I'm not gonna do that today, it will just make this too long. Um, you don't need it to win the race, you only need it to shorten enough during the race, and that's why so many traders love it. And I think that's a fairly good explanation as to why people love it so much. Um, so what I'm gonna go through here is I'm actually gonna go through um a strategy that we've created. We do actually email these horses out every day. The basic premise of this is very simple. We're just looking for horses that dob 70% of the time. Okay, now because this is an example strategy, because this is something we give out to new traders, um, ones who answer the feedback questions, and this is the strategy that makes sense for them, we assign it to them. I think there's more that can be done with it. In fact, I'm sure there's more that can be done with it. It's so basic at the moment, and I'm sure you could tweak it, make it better, turn it into something even more profitable, perhaps get the snake graph going in your favour a little bit more. There is some variance with this. Again, you're always gonna get variance on a strategy where you either make or break on the trade. So here you either make 100% profit or lose 100% profit. So again, staking is key. I'm only using £10 stakes for this example, very small stakes. Again, if you're a newer trader, you're probably even gonna want to start lower than that. You might even start £1 stakes. Um, but anyway, this is the Dobbs strategy, and the horse selection rules are very simple. Okay, so we're looking at betfair starting price, we chose comparison greater than okay, so that's our operator, and we want obviously the starting price to be greater than the lowest price in running times two. Okay, so we're looking for horses that have halved in price, and that's essentially what's that's saying. Um, and if you look at the runs and if you have a look here, it will show you the um clock bit here that says in 70% of all their runs, okay? And in the runs we've done between 10 and 300. The reason for this is we want the horses to have had quite a lot of runs, okay. Um so that's brilliant, and then you click next and you get onto the betting rules. Now, as I say, flat stakes, £10 stakes, 2% commission taken into account. Um let's look at place your bets. We're obviously backing, that's the start of our bet. Odds between 3 and 25. Now, I I know that it can be difficult sometimes at higher odds, you know, when you get up to kind of 25 uh to get matched, uh, because a lot of those horses the there just isn't the weight of money that there is, obviously, on horses that are 3.0 or even let's say odds on. Okay, so the market the money does tend to lean towards the favourite, doesn't it? Um, so once you get out towards a 25, it can be a bit more difficult. You could lower this and see how it got on. Um, I haven't done that. You could go through and see well, what if it was three to fifteen, uh three to ten? I mean, that would be really easy to get matched on. Um, betting window 10 seconds for the start of the race. We have just done the official race start here, uh, so odds could change a bit. Obviously, you might want to do it at the actual off because often horse races start a little bit later, don't they? Um, but that's up to you. Again, I don't believe that this is the perfect strategy for Dobbs or that this strategy itself couldn't be markedly improved. But I want to show you an example of something that's an example strategy, very basic, very simple, but effective. Number of qualifiers, we haven't done any restrictions on the rest of this stuff. You can have a look at those in your own time or pause the screen. And then closing your trade, we're laying at one point, so that means we're laying at one point profit. So essentially, we either make one point profit or we lose one point if the price is not matched because the A is no exit time, so we are not exiting this trade if our price doesn't get matched. We just take the L and move on, as they say in America. Um, okay, so we've already done that, and then you can customize your results. I love this bit by the way. So with this, you can choose, oh, actually, I want to look at course, country, direction, going, all that stuff. And when you look to tweak a strategy, I strongly recommend doing that. I don't recommend just taking stuff out just because it slightly isn't working, but if there's something obvious, like let's say you look at the going, and then you see, oh hang on, when it's heavy, it performs really, really badly, then it kind of makes sense to get rid of it, right? Because those kinds of conditions are the horses that you're backing are struggling, clearly. Uh makes sense, right? And then run the strategy, which is what we're gonna do here. And you have to wait a few seconds for that, so I've just had a quick drink. Um but as you can see, um a thousand pounds profit, just to ten pound stakes, which is obviously really good, um, 106 points up overall. You can have a look at the ROI strike rate, all this stuff, it's super cool. Um but what I'm gonna have a little look at here is the snake graph, because if you've watched some of my strategy videos before, you'll know I'm fascinated by this graph. And you look at this graph, this is the orange one, by the way. I'll try and get it not to have the words keep popping up on it. If you look at the graph, actually it's it's gone in a fantastic way, it's gone the way you'd want it to, right? But like I say, there is some variance, so I mean, you know, you can see here there's quite a drop-off between October, um, well, yeah, sort of November 25 to January, um, and then it's moved back up again, okay. And again, that that's kind of the kind of variance you're gonna get with a strategy like this where it's an all or nothing trade. Okay, so be aware of that. Again, I I believe you could improve this strategy of a little couple of tweaks here and there, and hopefully the training and learning you're doing on lightspeed stats.com will help you with that um to kind of iron that out a little bit because I know a lot of people struggle with variants um of any kind. Now you're gonna get variants in Betfair Trading regardless, but obviously, you know, the least we can get the better, um, more for your mental health than anything else. But actually, you know, if you think if you look at it this way, since the start of it, and this is just a £10 stakes, like I say, no further tweaking, just using these set rules every time. It's quite impressive, really, for something so basic and simple to be able to beat the market in the way it has, and then to think, well, wow, I bet a tweak or two here or there could really, really improve it. Um, so yeah, I think that's that's one of the reasons people like Dobbs, and then you can look at the specific profits for the month. This is what the breakdown will do, depending on what you choose. So when you look at the breakdown, you can actually look at well, what sections are working and what's not. So this is where the course results would pop up and things like that. Um, but I didn't add those. And you can actually look at it year to year and say, Oh, well, 2025 actually made a loss. Okay, it's the only year that has. And the two the three years that sandwiched that year uh have made like basically the thousand pounds between them. So again, that's the kind of thing that it how many people, and this is a good question actually to ask Betfair traders how many people would stick with a strategy if they didn't make profit in one year? Okay, and again, this is something that has been simple, effective, and it's made a lot of money over time. But again, I think a tweak or two, you cut that variance, you're probably getting a profit every year. Um, but yeah, so that's Dobbin kind of in a nutshell. That's what it's all about. That's why people like the strategy. It's very simple, it's very clear, it's very easy for newer traders to use. As I say, this is an example strategy we give out to members. If you haven't become a member, well, become one. If you're a football member or you've been a member before, just get in touch and we can sort you out with a code for your membership, and yeah, give it a go. Because ultimately, if you can test your strategies like this and do back testing, and we've got this with the horse racing, we've now got it with the football, you know, you're you're trading, you're changing your trading life. We get so many emails now from people just saying, Wow, we're doing really well out of Betfair Trading now. Thanks for the software. Um, and you know, that's what makes it all worthwhile long term for us because we know we're making a difference, and we want to make a difference for you. So give us the chance to do that. Alright, guys, I hope you had a great video. If you want those free strategies again, just say the word free, we'll send those over to you. Please like, subscribe, do all those things uh for this video. Obviously, like I say, we're a brand new channel, so literally every like, comment, subscribe is it makes a huge difference, okay, percentage-wise. You know, one of these channels that's got like 15,000 um subscribers. Well, you know, it doesn't make a huge difference, does it? We still like it on Betfair trading community because that's the number we have on there. Um, but yeah, this makes a huge difference. So help us out, guys, because it'll help you out and you'll get these videos quicker. And I'll do more of them uh if we get a bigger, obviously, people watching them. Alright, guys, hope you have a great week. Most importantly of all, I hope you make some money trading the horses on Betfair.