UK Greyhound Lay Bet Guide
This is a definitive guide for long-term growth, rather than a “get rich quick” scheme.
Many bettors are put off by laying greyhounds because of the liability—the amount you have to risk to win what seems like a small return. It can be daunting, especially when stakes increase during a recovery phase following a loss. However, the key to success in 2026 is shifting your mindset to view this as a long-term investment.
It is important to be realistic—there will be losing days. However, the objective is for the winning days to significantly outweigh the losing ones over the long term.
The Trade-Off: When laying greyhounds (betting on them to lose), the liability stakes are higher than when betting to win. However, the trade-off is in your favor: it is statistically much easier to find a loser in a six-dog race than it is to pick the single winner.
Why Laying Greyhounds Work
Results: Averaging a humble £30 profit per day (I am guilty of letting it run more than this)
The math: Average 30 days X Average £30 = £900 profit per month. Some members have built confidence and target £50 per month which equates to £1500/month profit. My personal target is £30 per day. To hit this, you would usually need about 8 successful lay bets.
Chances: Backing a Greyhound to win gives you a 16.67% chance of winning. You have a greater chance of laying the Greyhound (to lose) with 83.33% in a 6-runner event.
Statistics: We increase these chances with a multitude of statistics to confirm the selection goes the way we want it to.
** remember that Betfair charge commission on the winnings.
Choosing the Greyhounds to Lay
We have made the selections simple as possible for you.
Navigate to the “Lay Bets” page (members only)
Identify: Look for the greyhound selections highlighted with a “Yellow” background. These are your targets.
Select: Put these selections into your Automation Bot and wait for the results. I recommend being even more selective with the races you choose and tweak according to your preference.
** some Bots allow you to simply upload a file (.CSV in most cases) to automatically loads your tips. For this reason, you have the option to download this file on the Lay Bets page saving you a lot of time in the selection process.
Refining Your Strategy: Manual Selection
So far, this guide has demonstrated the “set and forget” method: downloading the .csv file and loading it directly into BBP. This is the simplest way to execute our Greyhound lay bets strategy.
You have full control to be selective.
While I prefer to load the file and let the software run automatically, you are not forced to accept every single selection. You can open the Bet Schedule within BBP and manually uncheck specific Greyhound lay bets if they don’t meet your personal preference.
Common filters used by our members include:
- Skipping Grade A11 races (lowest grade).
- Removing dogs running in Handicap races.
Ultimately, the software is your tool—tailor it to suit your risk appetite.
You will find the data uploaded daily in an easy-to-read structure with additional options to download in a CSV or Excel format. On the site page, you can also scroll to the right of this document where the yellow lay selections are extracted.
So how does this work?
The data presents the targets (the selections that are the best lays in the events) in a yellow colour filled cell. That’s it. Those are the best lays for the race. Now, there is further criteria to minimise risk because, as you know, sometimes, these lays actually do win the race on occasions. No-one can fully predict the outcome.
Although we use sources such as Racing Post, Betfair, Timeform and most importantly, our custom-built SoftwareGen application, the race overall is up to you to choose your selections produced from our data-driven criteria.
A few pointers that we use are:
⇴ If there are more than 2 lay selections in yellow for the race, choose the lowest rank (number)
⇴ If there are less than 6 runners, we opt to ignore the race (up to you)
Bot Settings
It doesn’t matter what your preferred Bot application is, or even if you manually trade. My recommendations are:
• BetBotPro • BF Bot Manager • Bet Angel
We recommend the following rules to control your trades/bets.
Time to bet: 0-60 seconds out.
Odds range: 1.01 – 12.0
Maximum liability: This is totally up to you. This is the amount you are willing to lose per race. I started testing many years ago with a £10 liability and slowly increased this with fine-tuning and confidence. It is currently set to £80.
Bets per race: 1.
Stop Loss: £150 (the amount you are prepared to lose in a worst-case scenario)
Target profit: £30 (the Bot will stop once it reaches this set target). You can change this at a later date once your confidence (and bank balance) grows.
Unsettled bets Allowed: 3. (Why? Greyhound races often overlap. This ensures the bot keeps working even if the previous race result hasn’t settled yet.
The staking plan is up to you how you want to handle your strategy.
The recovery method: Set recovery to 33.33% (3 cycles). How it works: If a lay bet loses, we recover the loss over the next 3 winning bets rather than risking it all on one. Example: You lose £36. Your base stake is £4. The recovery adds a third of the loss (£12) to your base stake. Your next bet is £16.
The “Dry Run” method: No recovery, just a straight lay per race and accept the loss and move on.
Initial Requirements:
Before you begin, ensure you have the following three accounts set up:
Membership: Sign up to DogRaces.co.uk to get our daily tips
Automation Software: Choose your preferred automation software. Usually they have free trials and definitely use in practise mode if you are new to automating. My recommendations are BF Bot Manager, BetBotPro or Bet Angel.
Exchange Account: Ensure you have a betting/trading exchange account. The recommendation is Betfair.