Advice

Are You Ready To Make More Profits?

Happy New Year. This is the first post of 2015.

2015.

Wow… that sounds so futuristic!

I’m only a little bit disappointed that we haven’t got flying cars yet, but I’ll get over it.

However, more importantly. It’s a new year and that means we can look back over the previous year to determine how we did in our betting and make improvements so that this year we make even more profit.

And today, I’m going to show you exactly what you should be checking.

I am assuming that you have been keeping records of your betting.

If you haven’t, then you should download my bet tracking spreadsheet here and start recording your bets from today.

Recording your bets is probably the most important part of your betting.

Without records you have no way of looking back and analysing where you are going right and where you are going wrong. And you need to be able to do this in order to improve.

Otherwise you’ll just be making guesses about what you think is happening in your betting rather than making decisions based on data.

If you are already keeping records, and I’m sure that as a Race Advisor reader you probably are, then let’s look at what we can consider to improve your current strategies in 2015.

The first thing we want to check out is your different bet types.

It is very unlikely you are going to be equally successful across all bet types.

In fact, I’ve never met someone who can make similar levels of profit across all bet types, some make them a lot more than others.

All you need to do is to check out our Tipster Proofing and look at how different tipsters perform to different bet types (a significantly under-used feature to making a lot more profit from tipsters), to see how few perform well across multiple bet types.

Break down your results into bet types and consider the following information:

  • Profit (to flat stakes)
  • Return On Investment (ROI)
  • Strike Rate
  • Quantity Of Selections

All of these pieces of information need to be considered together. Get these figures for each of the bet types you have used in your strategy and write them down on a piece of paper so that you can view them all at the same time.

You should be asking yourself the following questions:

  1. Have I made a profit to this bet type?
  2. Am I happy with the ROI and does it compare favourably to other bet types?
  3. Are there enough selections to make it worthwhile spending the time finding these selections when the ROI and profit is also taken into account?
  4. Does the Strike Rate add any benefit or drawback? i.e. high strike rate keeps overall selections strike rate high

Next, write down the answers to each of these questions on another piece of paper.

When you’ve done that, go through your answers and score each bet type out of five for it’s importance towards your betting process.

Your betting process is not just your profits.

It should also be your strike rate and ROI. If a particular bet type is keeping your strike rate high, and you know you need a high strike rate in order to make downswings shorter then it can even be making a small loss as you need it to maintain your emotional ability to stick to your selections during those downswings.

When you’ve finished scoring your bet types, mark the ones that you will definitely be keeping. These will usually be rated four or five.

Now, carefully consider all the rest of the bet types you use and determine whether you should keep them in and why.

Any that you don’t have a strong reason to keep, you can remove from your selection process.

When you’ve finished this process it’s now time to dig into whether you can improve your selections.

If you use a betting system with set rules then you can ignore this step. You don’t want to break your system.

This step is if you use form-reading in your analysis.

You should have been keeping notes about why you chose a selection. If you haven’t been doing that, then 2015 is the year to start. I promise it will make a big difference in the future.

Filter your results so that you only show the losing bets from horses that were one length or further away from the winner.

These are the horses that you selected which weren’t that close to the front at the end of the race.

You don’t want to include horses that performed really well and only just missed out in this analysis.

Now read through all of your comments on why you made selections.

On a new piece of paper write down anything that becomes a recurring commenty. Personally I like to write down any major reasons that appear more than once and then add 1 to the count every time it re-appears.

I’d also recommend marking each selection when you add one of it’s comments to your notes, that way you will be able to filter your selections based on the notes you’re now taking in a moment.

By doing that you’ll have a list of what appeared most often in your comments for horses that lost.

Once you’ve done this take the comment that appeared most often on your losing horses and see how often it appeared on winning horses, or horses that came within one length of the winner and mark these horses.

Now you have marked two types of selections for the comment that appeared the most often. Ones that lost are marked and ones that won/came within a length of the winner are marked.

Work out the results for these two sets of selections and determine whether:

  1. You find more winners or losers for horses with this comment
  2. You make a profit or loss from the horses with this comment
  3. Whether the strike rate is high/low for horses with this comment

This information will provide you with an insight into your own form reading and whether when you write a comment down for a specific horse this is indicating a horse that loses more often than it wins or makes a loss long-term.

With this knowledge you can then improve your selection finding based on your form reading by removing those runners that you select which aren’t profitable.

Michael Wilding

Michael started the Race Advisor in 2009 to help bettors become long-term profitable. After writing hundreds of articles I started to build software that contained my personal ratings. The Race Advisor has more factors for UK horse racing than any other site, and we pride ourselves on creating tools and strategies that are unique, and allow you to make a long-term profit without the need for tipsters. You can also check out my personal blog or my personal Instagram account.

6 Comments

  1. Handicapping your own form, a simple but effective way to make dramatic improvement. And I would wager a small minority of bettors actually carry it through.
    Mark that as a comment in the loss column for them.

    Well done Michael.

  2. I always bet on Australian race cards which are the only ones available, until I go online with a online service which is a while away. I appreciate your advice. Please keep up the good work. Hopefully in the near future I will be betting online. Thanks again and have a wonderful 2015.

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