Back in October I wrote the first post using archived betting systems. The idea was that we could take an old betting systems rules for horse racing, see if it worked or not and then discover whether we could make it turn a profit.

It proved to be very popular and so in today’s post I thought we would look at the next one.

As last time, and as will always be,I have no idea if we’ll be able to make it profitable because I’m going to be writing this post as I go through the process rather than after it.

Today’s betting system is a horse racing system that’s designed to find profitable bets on the all weather.

THE RULES

The rules that must be followed are:

• Only bet at Lingfield, Southwell and Wolverhampton
• Consider only horses with highest speed rating (TS is suggested but we will be using our own)
• 4 to 5 year old horses only
• Horse must be in top 4 in the betting forecast
• Forecast odds must be between 4/1 and 14/1
• Races must be 1 mile 6 furlongs or less
• No maiden races

When this system was available the creator quoted a strike rate of 22%.

In 2014 applying these rules would have resulted in 81 selections.

These selections should be backed with no specific staking system, so we are looking at it simply to flat stakes.

At the end of the year you would have lost -1.4 units to SP and made a profit of +5.45 units to Betfair SP.

The selections yielded an 22% strike rate, which is pretty good, and a 6.73% ROI to Betfair SP is pretty good.

CAN WE MAKE A PROFIT

Well the bottom line in 2014 is yes. But will that continue into the future?

There’s no way of knowing for sure, if there was then the creator of the system would be living in a palace.

But there are some indications.

The first concern is that there are only 81 selections a year. That’s not a very big sample, so I’m going to add in all selections in 2015 as well.

This gives us 157 selections. And some good news:

With a bigger sample we’re in profit to both SP and Betfair SP.

But what if we look at these results in more detail by breaking down the age of the horses, we discover that…

The four year olds have only won 11 of the 34 winning bets, and they’ve made a loss of -6.98 to Betfair SP.

So… by removing the four year olds the profit to Betfair SP increases to 32.32 units across 98 selections.

NEW RULES

Due to the very low number of selections that this process finds we can’t narrow our search any further as the data sample will become ridiculously small.

However, by only considering horses that are 5 years old we’ve increased the ROI to Betfair SP up to 140%.

With a sample this small my primary concern is that it won’t be consistent within horse racing. And with that in mind I would consider using this selection process as a contender finder process rather than a pure selection process.

In just a few minutes it will find a small quantity of horses each year, around 5 per month, which have a very strong chance of making a profit. I would then go into the individual races and analyse these selections further to remove some of the bets where the runners clearly aren’t going to be able to compete in a race.

Using this manual process at the end allows you to easily remove horses that clearly are unable to win a race in a way that a rules based system will never be able to. And doing this can significantly increase your profits.