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Background

In my view laying is all about risk and the management of that risk. You can spread the risk by betting a relatively small amount on a number of runners considered not likely to win throughout a day, in the hope that even if you do have the bad luck of one or two of them actually winning; you would still end up ahead because the impact of those winners would hopefully be minimal.
I have tried that route and although it did generate a long term profit, it did mean I had to keep a hands on approach for what was a relatively small gain. I also tried different “betting bot” programs but found they weren’t very robust and would frequently stop working.

This led me to move to the other end of the scale to what on first appraisal is a far riskier approach.
I prefer to spend a greater amount of time checking out the chances of a few short priced favourites in the hope that I can find candidates that could be wrongly priced by the market. This is where I see the risk being managed and not by trying my luck on a basket of races.
I am lucky if I find more than a couple on any normal day and then concentrate my efforts on betting against these winning.

Selection Process

The first port of call each day is to look at every race and note those that have favourites that are priced less the 3 (2 to 1).
This is the first stage of the filtering process and reduces the number of runners you have to look at to just a handful.
The next stage is to find out why the market considers the runner to be the most likely winner.
The final stage is to consider each other runner in the race and whether any can be considered worthy challengers.

What I am looking for is reasonable doubt against the favourite, but rather than list these out now I feel pointing out these factors as the weeks and months go by will be more helpful.

Using the selections

I work to some very simple rules and the first and most important is to run for the hills as soon as a profit is in the bag.
I don’t follow the list of selections blindly and I am always on the look out for reasons NOT TO BET rather than the other way round.
If a price goes over my limit of 3 then I’m out.
I rarely lay anything too far in advance but it’s not out of the question; it all depends on the circumstances at the time.
I am wary if a price comes down dramatically just before a race especially if it’s on heavy volume.
If I lose on the first lay I will tend to use any other selections in order to get back to square.
Trying to cancel out a loss and then move into profit is bit too much of a hill to climb and I prefer to call it quits with my stake money back.
I use level stakes and only increase them when the betting bank can take it. There is no fixed percentage level that would trigger this but is more down to what is comfortable.

I have now added the runners that I consider the challengers to the lay selections. If any of them get withdrawn then that's a very good excuse for pulling out.