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Mick – if it was so easy why don’t you simply lay all of these truly dreadful jockeys?
I would suggest that the reason that you don’t win at betting and are unable to sustain betting 3 figures anymore has very little to do with poor jockeys and has more to do with poor knowledge of racing and inability to learn from mistakes. Jockeys are clearly a part of the equation but I would argue it is a much smaller part of the equation than you realise.
There are plenty of top level punters that have survived for years at the very top level although it is true that generally they shun publicity but Patrick Veitch, Chris Broom and Tony Bloom are three I can think of off the top of my head. Billy Walters in the states is a very good example although he is largely as good as the people that work for him and his genius is in the logistical side. Billy Baxter is another american who has past the test of time as have the HK syndicates that are all run by americans and Zelkjo Porobovic (spelling?) in Oz.
Strikes me as quite ironic that bookmakers like Ladbrokes, Hills and Corals who all do, or have done in the past, played a major role in shortening horses on racecourses consider arbers to be scum. So taking a price on a racecourse that you know you can lay at shorter is what if it isn’t arbing? and what exactly is it that prevents those same bookmakers from actually going onto the exchange and laying the horse in question and extracting more value? The first day I worked in a trading room many years ago I was told that I could let punters have whatever they wanted at SP or first show because we could make them whatever we wanted them to be!!!!
Very much a case of the pot calling the kettle grimy ass……
I think this specific example is less a case of Ladbrokes and Hills having inside knowledge but rather that they are less attached to mirroring the movements on the exchnages. If you want a bookie at the other end of that spectrum then Betfair punters seem unable to sneeze these days without Victor Chandler catching a cold. Hills and Ladbrokes are the only two books that will consistently offer prices bigger than the lay side on Betfair. On that basis I think they should be applauded whereas the others seem unwilling to be different from the market as a whole.
"Accumulators are also unsound, any negative edge is multiplied over the selections, so unless you are getting value, you are going to lose quicker than just betting in singles."
This is only true if you have a negative edge. If you have a positive edge then that is also multiplied. For punters with an edge multiple bets offer a better ROI albeit with much higher variance and longer losing runs etc. (I promise I will post something about racing soon and stop boring people with maths
)Beating SP is a big part of it for sure. Bear in mind that betting at Even money the bookies would only expect you to win about 47-48% of your bets so if you are beating that number by 5 then you are betting something like 10% more winners than the books would expect you to which is a pretty significant number. It doesn’t mean that there is no chance that you have been lucky but that there is a good chance that it is based on skill. If you can consistently beat SP that is a skill in itself and is something that the bookies look at when analysing you to see if you are a profitable customer or not. I have lost accounts in the past without ever making a profit with a bookie.
Okay DavidBrady you asked for it….
Calculate you average win/loss per bet (ie your total win/loss divided by number of bets), Compute the standard deviation Can be done easily in excel using the STDEV function, Calculate the standard error which is your standard deviation divided by the Square root of the number of bets placed. Finally, you then divide the average result by the standard error to come up with your T statistic.
Basically the higher your T stat the more confident you can be that your results are based on skill rather than luck. Any T stat of over 1 suggests that there is an 80% chance that it is down to luck rather than skill. When you get as high as a T stat of 3 then we are looking at 99%+ chance of your results being down to skill over luck. I would suggest in general you are looking for a T stat of 2 or higher which is generally 95%.
DavidBrady – there are plenty of statistical ways of assessing whether the number of bets is statistically significant based on the spread of results, strikerate and average price taken along with the profit/loss so far. I can go into it in detail if you are interested but it involves calculating something called a T statistic and checking to see whether your results fall within x standard deviations.
GTD – I would argue the absolute opposite. I can only have value before the race when the nature of the event isn’t binomial.
If for example a horse that I assess as having a 20% chance of winning is available at 9/2 I can make the assessment prerace that, for a £100 bet I have £10 of value or positive expectation (5.5*20%*£100=£110 minus my original stake). After the race we are dealing in absolutes so I cannot make that judgement anymore because it is either a winner or not. Just because it won does not mean that I did not have a negative expectation on the bet ie I would, if I had the same bet 100 times, expect to lose money overall.
My first post here so go easy.
Firstly to Reet Hard. I do bet on things that are handicapped for a living and it is still based around value. If both teams are 10-11 and the handicap is -3 and I back the favourite it is nothing to do with me finding the winner. I am simply making a ‘value’ judgement that the team I am backing has more than a 52.38% chance of covering that handicap. It is no different….I am still assigning a percentage chance at that handicap.
To equitrack,
"The value hunters that frequent these boards often state that the horse they fancy is too short, but ‘at the price’ another horse makes more appeal. In effect they’re saying that they believe one horse will win, but they are prepared to back another because its price is not truly indicative of its chance in their eyes."
The whole point of hunting for value is that you don’t think or believe that one horse will win. You accept that every horse has a chance of winning and your task when assessing a race is to assign probabilities to those chances. Of course some horses are more likely to win than others but my task is to find odds that exceed my assessed probabilities not to find the horse most likely to win. Indeed I may on some occasions bet more than one horse in a race. Theoretically I could back ten horses in an eleven runner race. It is all about what price the market is offering aganst what I think the correct price is.
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