Advice

Are You Tracking Your Bets The RIGHT Way?

Download Your Tracking Spreadsheet Here
(if you like it, please share this post)

Over 90% of betting public fail at the first betting hurdle. This hurdle is not difficult, requires no special skills and does not take much learning. But… it requires the dedication to spend 20 minutes of your time on it every day.

It is… tracking your bets!

If you don’t track your bets then I will guarantee one thing. You’ll make a loss.

Okay you may get some winning streaks and be lucky, but ultimately you will make a loss. There’s not a single professional bettor that I’ve ever heard of who doesn’t track their bets.

That should tell you straight away that if you want to make a profit then it’s something that you MUST be doing.

The most common reason for not tracking bets that I hear is… “I’m not sure what to track or how to use it”. After today there will never be a reason for you to say that again.

First of all let’s look at the reason why we must track all our bets. We track our bets so that we have a record of everything we’ve done, why and whether it won or lost. We can use this as a guide to both refine our selection process and also to use as a guide to enable us to know if the selections are having an expected losing streak or if something has actually gone wrong with our methods.

Most punters don’t know what they’ve been betting on in the past, so they have absolutely no idea of how to improve it.

Now let’s look at what we should be recording. We want to record:

Date, Time, Course, Selection, Bet Type, Odds, Win/Lose, Return, Profit

That’s the minimum information that you should be recording for each and every single bet you place. But then…

…we want to also calculate some figures to help us assess the success of our selection process. These are:

Winners, Losers, Runners, Strike Rate, ROI

The first three are fairly self-explanatory. The Strike Rate is how often your bets win, e.g. 25% of the time. ROI is the amount of return you make compared to your bets e.g. 50% means you are making 50% of your bets in profit. If you bet £100 then you would expect to make a profit of £50.

Once you’ve got all that basic information we can add in some more advanced details:

Average Losing Odds

Average Winning Odds

Average Odds

Expected Winners

Expected Strike Rate

Impact Value

Probability of Achieving a Negative Yield

95% Bank Low Deviation

I’m going to explain what these all mean. The first three explain themselves without need of more details and so we shall start with Expected Strike Rate.

Expected Winners

We can work out how many winners we would have had assuming the odds we were taking accurately predicted the horses chance of winning. The lower the Expected Winners to the Actual Winners then the larger our profit.

Expected Strike Rate

As with Expected Winners, we can also work out what our Expected Strike Rate should be. The lower the Expected Strike Rate to the Actual Strike Rate then the more profit we will be making.

Impact Value

This is a very useful figure which tells you how much more often your selections are winning than if you were simply betting randomly. Anything less than 1 means you selections are performing worse than just randomly picking horses. Anything more than 1 indicates that your selections are better than picking randomly. For example, 1.10 would mean you are picking horses that win 10% more often than if you were to randomly pick selections.

Probability of Acheiving a Negative Yield

A bit of a mouthful and the title looks scary, but don’t worry. This is a very useful figure to know because it tells you how likely you would be to have gone bankrupt over the course of your selections if you’d had winners and losers in a different order. Because the figure is a probability it goes between 0 and 1. To make it into a percentage you multiple it by 100. So a figure of 0.50 would be the same as 50%. The lower this number the better and you will find the more selections you have the lower it gets.

95% Bank Low Deviation

Another incredibly useful number. This tells you, with a 95%  confidence, how low your bankroll could have gone over these selections if the wins and losses had come out differently.

I know what you’re thinking…

“How am I going to calculate all this?”

And the good news is… you don’t have to worry about it because I’ve made something that’s going to do it for you. You can download it from underneath the video at the top of the post.

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.

25 Comments

  1. Hi Michael.
    The spreadsheet looks very useful and includes some data that I haven’t recorded in the past so I’m looking forward to using it. I haven’t been able to download it yet though because when I it the ‘like’ button I’m getting this error message: Invalid App ID: 62549597129348. I have tried in a different browser and the same thing happens. Any ideas? Cheers.

  2. Hi Michael,
    Ive just watched your video for the spreadsheet. An excellent tool. However, when I click on the facebook share link, the page comes up blank as it will not connect. Is there another way to get your spreadsheet?
    Great articles.

  3. Hi Michael

    I love the spreadsheet but could you answer a couple of questions.
    1. As I mostly bet with a bookie, should I be adding my stake before entering in the odds column
    2. All returns are shown to a unit of 1. What if my EW bet is 1 unit each way. Should I show this as two separate bets?

    Regards

    John

  4. Hi Mike, thanks very much this looks a useful spreadsheet. I have downloaded it but when I hit the button to allow editing all sorts of error messages come up. What would you suggest?

    Thanks

  5. Hi Michael

    I have already submitted this note but, it seems to have disappeared into the ether. So, here goes again.

    I love the spreadsheet. Thank you.
    However I have a couple of questions that perhaps you could answer for me.
    1. As I bet mostly with bookies should I include my stake when entering the odds into the spreadsheet?
    2. If I bet EW let us say at 1 unit each way. How does the spreadsheet recognize that this is a 2 unit bet? Would it be better to enter the win and place as separate bets?

    Once again thanks.

    John

    1. Hey John. Thanks for your comment. You can certainly add a column with the stake size, and I’d record which bookie you placed the bet at as well. If you add the stake size in, the calculations will only automatically calculate for a flat stake of 1 unit unless you edit them. The spreadsheet automatically calculates for 1 unit flat bets so an EW is done as 50% win and 50% place. Make sure you enter the odds you are getting on the place portion of the each-way bet in the Place Odds column, otherwise it won’t calculate correctly.

  6. Hi, I have a deep hatred of face book but love your style of advice
    is there any way I could download your tracking spreadsheet without involving Facebook, I can certainly see the massive benefit of using it.
    hope to hear from you….Bernie

  7. Hi Michael, I did as you asked and hit the facebook share button but the page disappeared and I cannot access the spreadsheet. Could you help me with this please.

    Ann

  8. Hi Michael,
    I managed to download the speadsheet from Facebook only to find that it is not compatible with my old Excel spreadsheet. Is it compatible with any free spreadsheet do you know? I don’t understand your benefit of using Facebook. I avoid going there if I can.

  9. Thanks for excellent spreadsheet. However I am puzzled by ROI for winning lay bets. My lines may have changed, but I have winning lays at Lines 7, 8 and 42. Quoted ROIs are 15%, 93% and 20% respectively. How come? I would have thought they would all have been 95%. What am I missing?

    1. Hi Paul. The ROI is based on the amount risked and the risk is based on the odds for lays. For example at odds of 7.4 you are risking £6.40 for a £1 bet. This means your ROI is 1 / 6.40 which is 15%.

  10. Hi,

    Is this download still available please? I have shared RA on Facebook but there is no download link.

    Thanks

  11. I use different stakes sometimes, how can i let the spreadsheet know how much im betting

    1. The spreadsheet is designed to track your bets to flat stakes so that you can get an overview of how they’re performing without any staking plans. If you want to use different stakes then I would suggest adding a couple of columns to show the stake size and profit to different stakes. Or you can add a staking column and edit the formulas to adjust based on the stake being used.

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