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In June I had 201 bets and made a profit of 11pts. Since I started on 7th May, I have now had 299 bets for a profit of just 8pts.
There’s a story hidden in those figures however, because they include a quite dismal run towards the end of the month when I contrived to back no less that THIRTY-ONE consecutive losers. As a slight caveat: those are ‘main’ bets, I normally have savers to much smaller stakes in a race and a fair few of them won. Nevertheless, it was a drop of around 20pts in a very short period.
Obviously, prior to that I had done very well, building up a 30pts profit at one point mid-month and thinking I’d got the game by the goolies! Overall then, whilst I am happy enough to be in front, I still have a nagging disappointment regarding the month as a whole.
Furthermore, one of my winners paid 20-1+ in a novices’ hurdle. As I considered myself to be playing mainly in summer Flat handicaps, if I’d decided to just swerve that race (as I normally would) I would be well behind overall. Not good.
The extended bad run left me pondering the part luck plays in betting on horses. I thought that a handful of my selections were genuinely unlucky at the time – stopped in their run, fast finishers etc – but actually that’s quite a delusional state to be in. I’m sure that the archetypal ‘pro’ watches all the runners in a race with an eagle-eye but I just stare at the one I’ve got the bulk of my money on!
Obviously, then, I will be totally aware of every slight problem in running for my horse. And equally obviously, I will be blithely unaware of all the other problems the other runners may have had. If my horse finishes a rapid-closing second, I am unlucky, if my horse hangs on to beat a rapidly-closing second, I don’t give it a second thought!
Flat racing in particular is almost exquisitely structured to propagate this delusion of bad luck as by it’s very nature the action is compressed into the thrust of the final few yards. The split-second nature of decisions throughout adds to the vague feeling that one is almost always unlucky when one doesn’t win. Furthermore, the presence of an owner, trainer and jockey provides three perfect outside influences (culprits!) to distance oneself from one’s ongoing poor decision-making. Much like the modern football manager who cannot blame their overpaid, all-powerful players for the latest loss and are even less likely to blame themselves, the presence of the referee and linesman provides a natural conduit for their ire to cover this ineptitude.
They say that the search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. Let’s be honest, we all know who is to blame for our losing bets!
Mike
The extended bad run left me pondering the part luck plays in betting on horses. I thought that a handful of my selections were genuinely unlucky at the time – stopped in their run, fast finishers etc – but actually that’s quite a delusional state to be in. I’m sure that the archetypal ‘pro’ watches all the runners in a race with an eagle-eye but I just stare at the one I’ve got the bulk of my money on!
Obviously, then, I will be totally aware of every slight problem in running for my horse. And equally obviously, I will be blithely unaware of all the other problems the other runners may have had. If my horse finishes a rapid-closing second, I am unlucky, if my horse hangs on to beat a rapidly-closing second, I don’t give it a second thought!
Flat racing in particular is almost exquisitely structured to propagate this delusion of bad luck as by it’s very nature the action is compressed into the thrust of the final few yards. The split-second nature of decisions throughout adds to the vague feeling that one is almost
always
unlucky when one doesn’t win. Furthermore, the presence of an owner, trainer and jockey provides three perfect outside influences (
culprits
!) to distance oneself from one’s ongoing poor decision-making. Much like the modern football manager who cannot blame their overpaid, all-powerful players for the latest loss and are even less likely to blame themselves, the presence of the referee and linesman provides a natural conduit for their ire to cover this ineptitude.
They say that the search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions. Let’s be honest, we all know who is to blame for our losing bets!
Mike
I agree Mike. I try to console myself when one of mine is very ‘unlucky’ by reminding myself that on another day that happens to something behind a winner I’ve backed, even though I probably haven’t noticed it! I like to think luck evens itself out over time and try not to dwell on fallers, horses stopped in their run etc. Swings and roundabouts…
Whoever backed Opinion today probably feels unlucky though, and that’s hard to argue with!
The monthly updates are a good read by the way, onwards and upwards in July
Thank-you.
Upwards would be nice!
Mike
The Demon named Badluck crouches on the shoulder and pokes his mischievous finger into the neck of all punters; some find it a debilitating pain they can’t rid themselves of, others a fleeting irritation swatted away
Think I’ve mentioned before that a graph of an on-going profit/loss account of punters would resemble a skewed sine wave, with the troughs determining long-term progress: them slowly and erratically moving up and away from the break-even horizontal axis if long-term profit is achieved or down towards and below the horizontal axis if long-term loss is achieved; hence the climb to repeated peaks (winning runs) and the decay to repeated troughs (losing runs) being of no consequence, long term
Rapid and wildly fluctuating peaking and troughing is what your mission so far appears to have produced Mike, though the troughs have crept from a baseline of 0 to 8 over the two months
Two (initial) winning months in succession is decent going in my view
Perhaps it’s just luck
An enjoyable read
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR6C2liReuizmL-vFEhEU8_D3HCIoPdQQU9IazSCy2ccx7NHPLdNw
A very honest post, Betlarge.
Very important that you have identified the problem.
I do wish you the very best with your project.
Colin
Drone,
Take a look at Bill Benter’s chart at 30:00 dead in this 2004 presentation to the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians:
http://wmedia.hkedcity.net/archive/05/0 … pt04Ex.wmv(the whole thing is around a 120Mb download)
he starts on horses at about 23:20.
wit
Good reading, Mike. I hope you are keeping that diary – you’ll get a bestseller out of it
Take a look at Bill Benter’s chart at 30:00 dead in this 2004 presentation to the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians:
http://wmedia.hkedcity.net/archive/05/0 … pt04Ex.wmv(the whole thing is around a 120Mb download)
he starts on horses at about 23:20.
Thanks for that Wit
The graph Benter displays may not look remotely sinusoidal but as he points out the y-axis (on-going profit) is logarithmic rather than arithmetic and therefore smooths the line by attenuating the discrete maxima and minima; which perhaps somewhat misleadingly presents the on-going profit as a rather curvaceous steady climb without ‘hiccups’. Also the x-axis (number of races or bets) is a sample of 6000 (arithmetic) data points crammed into a narrow confine, which therefore compresses the discrete maxima and minima
I suspect that had the graph been arithmetic on both axes and the sample been say 500 data points taken over the same x-axis confine then it would have more closely resembled the over-simplistic "skewed sine wave" I proposed
In wave-form terms his graph both decreases the amplitude (logarithmic attenuation on the y-axis) and increases the frequency (arithmetic compression on the x-axis)
I think
The graph Benter displays may not look remotely sinusoidal but as he points out the y-axis (on-going profit) is logarithmic rather than arithmetic and therefore smooths the line by attenuating the discrete maxima and minima; which perhaps somewhat misleadingly presents the on-going profit as a rather curvaceous steady climb without ‘hiccups’. Also the x-axis (number of races or bets) is a sample of 6000 (arithmetic) data points crammed into a narrow confine, which therefore compresses the discrete maxima and minima
I believe this demonstrates that issue perfectly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzlH5SDGoyA
Mike
Mr Benter has kindly offered to graph the data supplied above by Betlarge and Indocine, and also his interpretation of Drone’s musings on the subject
Whether the axes are arithmetic, logarithmic, geometric or exponential I don’t know; though I’m pretty certain there’s cube-root attenuation in all three
Interesting stuff I’m sure you all agree
Betlarge
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~wmartin/cs523project/noise.256.256.gif
Indocine
http://chilling-dawn.com/wp-content/uploads/noise_reduction-white-200×200.jpg
Drone
http://www.brightlightpictures.com/assets/images/portfolio/whitenoise2_poster_medium.jpg
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