I'm taking a break from the ratings for a while. I'm going away for a few weeks to London and will be back in time for the start of the flat and Aintree but I am taking my Eee PC with Raceform Interactive software with me so will be working out a number of stats that I hope can be incorporated into the ratings to make them more reliable for substandard racing.
I also intend to kick off a couple of 'challenges'. I've decided to do this as I need to start treating this more like a job and try to gain a regular income from it, instead of waiting for the big meetings to come along.
Ages ago, when I was still a teenager, I used to employ a 'stop at a winner' method by staking a % of a bank, recouping losses along the way. It worked really well until I had to start working for 'the man' and just didn't have time to run it, but now I have the time on my hands and have been inspired by Brian Hogg's excellent site where he is employing a similar strategy, although he is setting a target % of his bank to make each day from 5 horses where he stops at a winner.
He has shown impressive results building a 1k bank to close to 18k since October 2008, so I am going to work out a similar method and employ it when I get back, mainly using my top-rated selections, provided they are not odds-on. The difference is I will look to take a % of the bank out each week as a ''wage' which will hopefully grow along with the bank and provide some sort of cushion should the inevitable losing streak occur. I'm going to aim for a bank of 50k by the end of the year from a starting bank of 1k.
The other thing I want to do is to employ a 'laying' system to utilise the Betfair account that I have.
I have done some research using Raceform Interactive and analysed those horses that started at Evens or shorter for the last 9 years. Here is what I found...
Query was all GB & IRE races, all horses that started at evens or shorter since the year 2000 up till now.
There were 16,659 qualifiers during this period with 9410 of them losing which means the lay wins approx 56.5% of the time. If you had laid all these at SP to lose 100 quid then you would have made a profit of over 100k. Of course, Betfair offer better odds than SP so this figure is probably a fair bit shorter than that (by approx. 20% if they are to be believed), but it's still a massive figure.
Broken down, I've found the following -:
Jumps odds-on shot (48k profit) are less profitable than flat odds-on shots (60k profit). So basically, odds-on shots over the sticks win more often than their flat counterparts from similar sample sizes.
Comparing chasers (14k profit) and hurdlers (30k profit) they both have a similar strike rate of around 57% but the hurdles lays produce over twice the amount of profit despite a difference is sample size of x1.5.
There are obviously more non-handicap races than handicap races but odds-on shot lays in non-handicaps (57%) are generally more reliable than odds-on shots in handicaps (51%).
So, building a system from this...I want to make it as simple as possible. So my 'rules' that I will test over the next few weeks for small stakes are -:
1) Avoid odds-on shots in handicaps. Considering 49% of odds-on shots score in handicaps, this is just a little bit too tight so I will leave this alone.
2) As I am testing this out I will start off with small stakes. I will lay to lose 15 quid on jumps odds-on shots and 20 quid on flat odds-on shots.
3) I will lay as close to the SP as possible, this will mean that I will put up the majority of the lays as in-running at the SP price. Hopefully, most of these will get matched in-play and this should ensure I don't lay at bigger odds than I should be.
Rule 1 is solid and I will stick with it, I'll keep an eye on Rule 2 for a month to see how that goes but I will have to keep an eye on rule 3 should I find that they are not getting matched and work out what the difference would be if I laid at Betfair SP.
Tuesday's 'lay' qualifiers are likely to be....
Kempton 3:05 CHINA GOLD 5/6
Wexford 3:05 TAWAAG 4/9
Down Royal 3:25 TURTLE TIME LUCKY Evens
Wexford 3:35 FIVEFORTHREE 8/15
Down Royal 3:55 ARBOR SUPREME 4/6
I'll see how it goes. I also want to look into 'trading' but feel that if you are going to do that, you have to 'just' do that and I am not at that stage yet to give it the full focus it deserves.
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