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Evening all
I have a dilemma and I’m hoping that the assembled brains of TRF might be able to help me. Having dabbled with cricket betting and one or two other things, I have come to the conclusion that nothing quite matches the challenge of betting on the horses. So, foolishly perhaps, I want to give it another try, having dabbled fitfully in the past.
Over the years, I have read everything from Potts to Nevison, pored over form books and looked at more angles than a (insert name of a profession where the study of angles is important). I have come to the conclusion that, for me, the only satisfactory way of tackling the thing is to specialise, to know everything there is to know about a group of horses.
I’m also keen to watch as many races as possible and to base my betting on my own opinions (for better or worse). For that reason, though I know many people swear by them, I won’t be using Timeform. I’ve written off the current flat season and have decided to begin with the NH season proper, giving me about three months or so to prepare. My inclination is to concentrate on the better class of horse from Kauto Star downwards.
My dilemma is how to go about it. I know that an awful lot of work is required, hence the elephant of the title, but where do you start? Should I watch every Graded NH race from last season and make notes? Should I work my way down the list of NH horses according to rating, stopping at around the 130-rated mark? Should I watch every race in every horse’s career, or just the last twelve months?
So my question to all of you is this. If you were me, where would you start? How would you go about it?
This isn’t I hope a complete self-indulgence as there may be many others out there at a similarly novice stage who would benefit from the collective wisdom of the forum.
.. Andrew, take a big deep breathe and step backwards .. and think about what you are trying to do.
Look at what is motivating you and decide if it is honourable or not?
Want to make money, intellectual exercise or something else?
Then decide how you want to approach things.
Philosophy is everything, surely?
Think you’ll find it tough with that approach Andrew. Why? Lots of very clued up people at the same game, particularly NH.
Andrew, if starting out I would do two things.
First, I would get two bits of paper, on the first bit of paper I would write down everything that can be taken from the form book; Course, Distance, Going, Jockey, etc etc. On the second piece of paper I would write down everything I may wish to consider in any future races. Then, looking at both bits of paper I would take a big black pen and put a line though anything I cannot be certain of. What remains is known and should be concentrated on all the rest is just guesswork that will make a mug of you.
The second thing I would do is to have a look at all the selections in say Bob Rolf’s 4PP for every player for say 4 weeks and try and workout how those selections where made and if there is any distinguishing features between the players that show a profit and those that don’t; i.e. the class of races played in, the number of runners etc. I’ve never done it so I don’t know what variables to list, but the point is to study winners: Pat123 may be a good place to start.
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Andrew
Specialise – otherwise, you haven’t an earthly of gaining an edge on people whose knowledge is far less thinly spread.
Whatever field you decide to specialise in, study the easy winners in that category, and find out why they won easily, (You’ll be surprised how many easy winners start at rewarding prices). It just has to be a simpler and more logical approach than figuring out why a horse won by a hard-fought head.
Use whatever knowledge gained as a template for future selections, but prove it in real time before ploughing in.Thank you all for your suggestions (apart from Colin!)
Interesting question, Dave and I wonder how many people have asked themselves that. I will give it some consideration.
I will have a look at the 4PP competition, Pompete and I take on board your sensible suggestion to concentrate on ‘the known knowns’ as Donald Rumsfeld put it.
Reet, that is an interesting idea – I think I remember reading Mark Nelson saying something similar – that he found things made sense when he studied why a horse won a particular race.
Food for thought.
Andrew,
Anyone with pretensions to making horse-playing pay cannot expect it to be reduced to snacking on a mouse but with specialisation you should reduce the burden to say tucking into a tapir rather than an elephant.
IMO the key to specialising in NH is knowing your subset of horses (e.g how does it jump?) and knowing the courses (e.g. the triplets Kempton, Huntingdon, Wincanton?) rather than being super-adept at interpreting collateral form and speed figures.
Can’t really fault the idea of sticking with 0-130 or better for betting purposes – a manageable population of horses – providing you’re not looking for continuous action day in day out. Which I doubt you are. Inevitably this will still entail dissecting the form of lower grade races when encountering the improving horse.
Are you happy involving yourself with both Chases and Hurdles? Both ostensibly ‘NH’ but rather different disciplines. Preference for either? If so might it be better to stick with one discipline and bet at say 0-115 up?
Given the attention to detail evident in your posts on cricket it is obvious your mindset is right for the job…but do you enjoy NH racing as much as you do leather’n’willow, so will you relish the unravelling as much? And would what success you’ve had betting the latter be damaged by diverting attention to the former? you are currently ‘specialising’ after all. Admittedly from a domestic betting point of view cricket would mix with ‘core’ NH admirably.
Given your performance in a recent Order of Merit competition was impressive I’d recommend going back through those ‘bets’, analysing them all again and asking yourself ‘why’
Dunno if it’s an urban myth but betting NH has long had a reputation for attracting more ‘pros’ to it than the Flat; that was certainly my impression when a semi-regular on course, though Exchanges have altered most things betting orientated. So Cavelino R may have a point.
RH writes "prove it in real time before ploughing in". Agreed, so while preparing your strategy for the NH season proper why not analyse some summer-jumping and paper-trade your bets. Real time race analysis is the tutor
par excellence
, along with actually seeing and recording the race; hence RUK and ATR are a must.
If you intend to compile a private handicap/ratings – which would seem to be the case – then good luck but for my part I found it all too time-consuming and no more effective than placing my own interpretation on the time-saving building blocks of commercially available ratings and chatter.
HTH – IMVHO
IMO the key to specialising in NH is knowing your subset of horses (e.g how does it jump?) and knowing the courses (e.g. the triplets Kempton, Huntingdon, Wincanton?) rather than being super-adept at interpreting collateral form and speed figures.
Agree. NH is still about the basic strengths and weakness of the individual racehorse rather than an exercise in mathematics. On the Flat, watering, ever changing track bias and an overall better standard of jockey in NH (imo) make jumps racing more attractive to old school punters who still rely on their eyes for betting purposes. Old school punters know the game and the horses backwards in NH, unless you can get on early enough you’ll be getting their leftovers.
Can’t really fault the idea of sticking with 0-130 or better for betting purposes – a manageable population of horses – providing you’re not looking for continuous action day in day out. Which I doubt you are. Inevitably this will still entail dissecting the form of lower grade races when encountering the improving horse.
Thats what 90% of punters do. Are you with or against the crowd? Bear in mind good jumps racing is almost totally dominated by 4 or 5 stables, those stables are good to the media, their horses have been analysed forensically. Difficult LONGTERM edge material.
Given the attention to detail evident in your posts on cricket it is obvious your mindset is right for the job…but do you enjoy NH racing as much as you do leather’n’willow, so will you relish the unravelling as much?
Good point. Enjoying it helps enormously. Again very difficult to have a LONGTERM edge if you don’t enjoy putting the work in.
RH writes "prove it in real time before ploughing in". Agreed, so while preparing your strategy for the NH season proper why not analyse some summer-jumping and paper-trade your bets.
CRUCIAL. Until you know yourself inside out as to how to you are as a gambler, what your strengths and weaknesses are and finding a strategy that maximises/minimises both you’ll struggle over the LONGTERM. I’d suggest a step up from paper trading. Do it with £2 bets, it hurts more you learn more. In the UK/Ireland the psychology of gambling (CRUCIAL) is still largely ignored. The Yanks have it well covered though, read their books!
If you intend to compile a private handicap/ratings – which would seem to be the case – then good luck but for my part I found it all too time-consuming and no more effective than placing my own interpretation on the time-saving building blocks of commercially available ratings and chatter.
Each to their own on that one. Compiling my own ratings is the cornerstone to my strategy. You have something that no one else has. June 17th just past marked my first ever 12 months of profitable punting, I couldnt have done it without my own ratings. It is time consuming but with the help of Excel manageable, if you want it badly enough you’ll find the time. Ratings suit the exchange model admirably.
Finally, knowing how other punters bet, what tools they use, what factors go into making a price, a price, is invaluable. Cant stress that highly enough.
Hope this helps, just opinions based on my own experience. Good luck, its a fascinating game.
You have to find an edge of some kind.
Edges come from information you have that others don’t, or a way of looking at information different to others.
There are any number of ways of getting such an edge, all of them involve considerable work.
This work needs to be somewhat pleasurable or you won’t do it.
How you gain your edge is completely up to you- it could be from viewing countless replays of races, from taking sectional times, from compiling lists of horses’ preferences or analysis of race trends but it needs to be sufficiently unique as to give you an edge on the market.
For what it’s worth, if I were starting again knowing what I do now, I’m not entirely sure I’d bother- for the hours put in, it’s a poorly-paid endeavour!Thanks everyone for your comments, a lot to digest and some useful advice from some knowledgeable quarters. I’m going to have to do some serious thinking before I respond.
Alternatively, you could always stick to backing horses whose names have some cricketing connotation or connection.
Gambling Only Pays When You're Winning
Good luck Andrew, I don’t envy you. Whichever method you select, measure it against a random selection to see if any profit you make, when divided by the time spent studying, is really worthwhile.
I may well be wrong ( I have great experience in that matter in everything from gambling to women) but unless your method is REALLY much more profitable than any random method, there doesn’t seem much point in burning all the midnight oil.
FWIW, I’ll repeat a tale I told on here many posts ago. Many years ago, I worked for a well know racing publisher. They ran an office naps table with a prize for the winner at the end of the season. Who won it (the year I was there)?
THE TEA LADY – who chose horses whose name she liked. All the regular racereaders, form book bods and friends-in-big-stable whisper merchants couldn’t match her (although, yes, some of them did show a profit).Sorry to sound like a wet-blanket. Now I’ll try and be positive.
Why not forget the NH and concentrate of six or seven flat trainers (not Stoutes or A.Obrien and the like) Get to know their Modi Operandi. Do they gamble? Are jockey bookings significant? Do they have a pattern to their race entries (only enter decent brutes in higher grade races)? Favourite tracks? Strike rate with horses dropping back in distance?If you intend to compile a private handicap/ratings – which would seem to be the case – then good luck but for my part I found it all too time-consuming and no more effective than placing my own interpretation on the time-saving building blocks of commercially available ratings and chatter.
Each to their own on that one. Compiling my own ratings is the cornerstone to my strategy. You have something that no one else has. June 17th just past marked my first ever 12 months of profitable punting, I couldnt have done it without my own ratings. It is time consuming but with the help of Excel manageable, if you want it badly enough you’ll find the time. Ratings suit the exchange model admirably.
To clarify: I wasn’t intending to dismiss the idea of private handicaps, just that the experiment didn’t work for me, or at least I didn’t feel the time and effort involved was justified as a means to an end I could more-or-less emulate without doing the extra work. Which only exposes my limitations rather than any in the concept of personal ratings.
Diligently compiled by the competent I’ve no doubt at all that they’re a valuable tool in helping find that elusive ‘edge’.
My preferred practice of adjusting commercial ratings – albeit in a rather nebulous way – and assigning chance following the tweaks is, in effect, no more than ‘real time’ private handicapping on a race-by-race basis rather than the standard method of maintaining a private historical database for future implementation.
On the subject of finding an ‘edge’, doesn’t it really just boil down to your ability to assess chance more accurately – LONGTERM – than the market (crowd) does: in essence an interpretation of little more than the "known knowns" alluded to in Pompete’s post that is more realistic than the madding crowd’s ideas?
I would agree with the comments about specialising. My best time as a serious punter was when I concentrated solely on 7f races on the flat of Class 4 (in today’s money) or better.
I picked that distance because I think it’s a specialist trip and it dramatically cut down the number of races I had to study each day. Thinking about it now, I don’t know whether it was the specialising on 7f races or the fact that I only studied a couple of races each day in great detail that led to a profit.
Maybe concentrating on the day’s two or three best races and analysing them in detail, watching past races of all the runners etc is another way to specialise?
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