The Betting Mastermind Review: Place Laying Tips

We have been following The Betting Mastermind service over the last four months and our bank has steadily increased by 11.5% overall. In total we have made a profit of 17.23 points at an ROI of 2.8%, using level 1 point stakes. However, you will see later in this review that the implementation of a new set of filters has more than doubled this ROI and boosted profit by 68%.

The service sends out daily horse racing selections for laying the horse in the place market at Betfair SP. This means there is no need to have any bookie accounts but a Betfair account is necessary, as it's unlikely that other exchanges would have enough liquidity in the place markets unless it's one of the bigger races. 

Breakdown of monthly profit/loss:

V1 Strategy

If you have following the updates to this review, you will have seen that Stuart (who runs the service) implemented a new strategy during the second month of our trial. This involved only laying selections that started as 4th, 5th or 8th favourite at the beginning of the race.

It's an unusual concept, but after analysing all of his previous selections he had found that applying this filter produced improved results.

The strategy proved to work well for us since we started using it from 8th September. Just to show the difference - from this date onwards if we had used the "Lay All" strategy we would have lost 5.01 points, but by using the new "V1" strategy we made a profit of 19.64 points.

If we apply the V1 filter to all of the selections from the beginning of the review we would have banked a total profit of 29.01 points at an ROI of 6.4%. Of course, we couldn't have done this as it didn't exist at that stage but it's good to know!

On the downside, the new strategy does mean you have to check the race near the start time to make sure the horse meets the criteria, as positions can change throughout the day. It may be possible to use a bot such as The Bet Engine to save time, but this would be an added cost.

Update 15/12/17: Stuart has advised that he is now offering a refund of subscription fees each and every month if he fails to deliver a profit using the V1 strategy.

We would say that based on the max drawdown of 17.6pts during our four month trial, the 150 point bank may be a little on the large side but that is down to personal choice whether to decrease that or not.

This is a bolt-on system that has recently been added to The Betting Mastermind that is based on laying horses to win rather than place and comes with a set of filters to use. The backtested results for the system show a profit of 26.9 points since August 2017.

Stuart expects Profit Accelerator to add a further 50 points profit per year. He has kindly offered our readers a discount when quoting "Goal Profits" making the add-on service an annual cost of £79.99, down from £129.99.

Since the new V1 filters have been in place, we have seen a great improvement in our results and it definitely seems to be the way forward. Stuart is constantly analysing his data to find new angles and has recently been looking into introducing V2 to the service. 

This would mean that laying horses in position 6 or 7 is viable, but at present it has only shown a very slight improvement to results so we would personally opt to stick with V1 for now.

It is important that a tipster is able to adapt and change things around to ensure they still have an edge, so it's great to see this service doing this. It can make things a bit more complicated having extra filters, but if it works then we have to run with it. Having access to a bot is ideal as it will place the bets according to your filters automatically.

At £19.99 we feel it is reasonably priced and there is a 60 day moneyback day guarantee with payments being handled by clickbank.

We're happy to recommend the service as a steady bank builder - it's a pass from us.

28th October 2017

Since implementing Stuart's new V1 strategy in our review of The Betting Mastermind there has been a notable improvement in our results. The idea is to only lay selections that start the race in position 4th, 5th or 8th and discard any others.

Laying all of the selections would have given us a small profit of 0.61 points, but with the new strategy we made a profit of 5.58 points.

From the beginning of our review our total profit now stands at 8.03 points, but we calculated that by using the V1 strategy from the start we would have had a much improved profit of 19.81 points. 

As the new strategy only came in to play mid way through our review, we have decided to extend our trial so that we can do some more testing and get a better overall picture.

Stuart has informed us that he has added a "snap-on" service to his site which is a simple system where you lay horses to win in races that meet certain criteria. So far the system has delivered a profit of 28.41 points from 66 selections.

The add on service is available at the reduced price of £89.99 per year for Goal Profits Review readers and he expects it to make at least an extra 50 points profit per year. We will monitor the results for this alongside the main service for the remainder of our review.

We'll be back in a month's time with our next update.

28th September 2017

Month two in our review of place laying service, The Betting Mastermind, has ended with a loss of 3.83 points, but there has been an interesting development from Stuart who runs the service.

After analysing the results of his past selections, he has discovered that horses that started the race as 4th, 5th or 8th+ favourite based on their Betfair SP have been the most profitable. Based on this he advised his subscribers to only lay these horses from the 6th Sept onwards.

Without using a bot this means that the races have to be monitored close to the off to determine whether the selection is a qualifying lay, but Stuart is working an on automated solution.

Looking at our results since starting the review, we can see that by laying all of the selections we would have made a small profit of 0.25 points, but following the new strategy (named V1) we would be in profit by 14.23 points.

Stuart has worked out that since June, V1 would have made an extra 13.56 points and has projected an added 48 points over a 12 month period.

We're interested to see how the next month goes following the new strategy and will report back soon with our latest results.

2nd September 2017

It's been a positive start to our review of The Betting Mastermind with a profit of 6.28 points at an ROI of 2.9% in the first month. Although it's not a huge gain, it's good to see that things are going in the right direction.

There has been a slight change to the service from the 15th August as the selections no longer come with early odds. This was causing confusion amongst subscribers as the majority of the time the Betfair place markets hadn't properly formed at the time the emails were sent out.

We have been advised to try and lay selections as near to the off as possible, so it makes sense just to set the lays up to be bet at Betfair SP. We have removed the early odds and available odds results as it is pointless including them in the review now and we will continue recording BSP results going forward.

Stuart has informed us that from the 4th September, subscription to The Betting Mastermind will cost £1 for the first 14 days followed by £19.99 per month, which is a £10 reduction on the previous price.

We will be back in a month's time with our latest set of results.

The Betting Mastermind Review: Introduction

10th August 2017

The Betting Mastermind is a new horse racing lay betting service run by tipster Stuart Neill, who recently contacted us to ask if we would consider starting a review. We are always on the look out for a good laying service, so we gladly obliged.

We've been recording the tips sent to us since the 26th July, but we've been waiting for the website to be completed before posting the introduction to our review. The site is now up and running so it's full steam ahead. ​

The service is fairly straightforward with lay selections emailed out each day, but rather than placing the lay bets in the win market, we are to lay the horse to place.

The bets are sent out with the current lay odds, but liquidity can often be an issue in the place market so Stuart has recorded his results using Betfair SP.

The early prices of the majority of the bets are between 2.0 - 4.0​, however we have been advised that a couple of the selections have drifted throughout the day to give a BSP of 8.0 - 9.0.

There isn't an odds limit for laying the selections, but Stuart advised us that having maximum odds of 6.0 wouldn't adversely affect the bank in the long-term and could be a good option for those that prefer a lower risk style of betting.

The service costs £1 for the first 14 days followed by payments of £29.99 per month thereafter and paypal is the accepted payment method. (Update 11.11.17 - The service now uses clickbank to handle payments and subscription costs £19.99 per month with a 60 day refund period).

The advised starting bank is 150 points and each lay is for a level 1 point stake, meaning the average liability will be approximately 2% of the bank.

We will continue recording results and will be back with our first update once we have completed a full month.