Dobbing Secrets & Fairbot – Review

This is a review of the excellent Dobbing Secrets Report, which is available here. After describing Dobbing Secrets I will use Fairbot, which I previously reviewed (link), to show the potential of the Dobbing Secrets system, when combined with the power of Trading.

Essentially Dobbing Secrets is a selection process that finds horses that are likely to shorten in price during the running of the race.

When you buy the Dobbing Secrets report, it comes in the form of a PDF document, which is clearly written with plenty of examples. For those that don’t know, the name comes from “Double Or Bust” or DOB for short.

In its simplicity you back a horse to win before the race starts then lay it to lose during in-running for double the stake at half the odds. If the shorter odds are not met in-running, then you lose your original stake (Bust). If the shorter odds are met during the race then you make a profit equivalent to the original stake (Double your money) whether the selection wins or loses. Hence “Double Or Bust”.

Like this, for example, taking into account the 5% Betfair commission:

Sounds easy! All you have to do is pick a horse that halves in odds during in-running! The Dobbing Secrets report uses a clever selection process to attempt to do this. With practice it takes just a few minutes to analyse a race, to see if there is a selection.

Once a horse is selected, the report advises placing a lay bet, not at half the odds, but at higher than half odds. If the horse wins you double your money, but break even at zero profit if the horse loses. Of course, if your lay bet isn’t matched, you lose your original stake. So it is not quite Double Or Bust, it’s Double, Zero or Bust.

This is a reasonable compromise, because you are more likely to get the lay bet matched rather than hoping the price drops all the way to half the odds; although it would be interesting to do some research to see how often selections do halve in odds, to enable a pure DOB.

The Dobbing Secrets report includes a spreadsheet example of how to account for the Betfair commission and still more or less double your money, as above.

Here’s a screen shot of this on the Betfair Exchange, where the lay bet has been matched to give a double or nothing scenario to a £10 stake.

The way the report describes things, you can set your bets earlier in the day, so although it is Trading, you don’t have to be watching the odds during the actual running of the race. You could, for example, set all your bets during your lunch break before racing starts.

So not every bet will win and not every lay bet will get matched, but the bank roll is advised such that it will never get threatened. The Dobbing Secrets sales page and the Dobbing Secrets report states that with the selection process 75% will shorten enough to get the lay bets matched.

I like the selection process and the description of setting the trading odds make Dobbing Secrets a very interesting system. It comes at a price of £47 and with £5 or £10 stakes and a Betting bank of £250 or £500 you should easily recover the purchase cost fairly quickly. £2 stakes with a bank of £100 will take you a little longer to recover the cost. You’ll probably find one or two trading opportunities per race meeting (taking less than ten minutes per meeting, with practice). The Dobbing Secrets manual uses the standard Betfair Exchange for placing the back and lay bets and it is perfectly feasible to use the system that way.

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Now I’ll go on to using Fairbot to demonstrate the flexibility and power of using this trading software with Dobbing Secrets.

I reviewed Fairbot on Race Advisor (link) here. Now I’ll show how you can use it with Dobbing Secrets.

Firstly I’ll show you how to use Fairbot in the same way as the Betfair Exchange – in this example, the only advantage in using Fairbot is the speed with which the betting odds are updated and the speed of placing bets.

So our selection for this race, using Dobbing Secrets, is Nearly Namad. We’ve placed a back bet of £2 at odds of 6.0 and, as advised by Dobbing Secrets, we are placing the lay bet of £2 at 4.8. As we want this bet to continue when the race goes in-play we select the option to “keep” the bet. In the above screenshot, under each runner, you can see the green figures once the lay bet is matched showing a profit if it wins of £2.40 and zero if it loses.

The above screenshot shows our unmatched lay bet and that the bet will stay in the market when the race goes in-play. So we are all set for the action.

The race goes in-play and the horse price shortens as we expected it to do, from our Dobbing Secrets research. The lay bet is matched and the horse goes on to win, giving us a £2.40 profit before 5% commission (£2.28 net profit) We’ve doubled our money!

Here’s another race:

Our selection is backed for £2 at 5.7 and the lay bet, as advised by Dobbing Secrets, is set for £2 at odds of 4.5. We are set to win £2.40 again if it wins.

It’s already shortened to 5.5 before the off, so things are looking promising.

The lay bet got matched in-play, but the selection lost so we made zero profit.

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However with the features of Fairbot, you can do much more. As explained above, your Dobbing Secrets selection and staking system can either double your money, give you zero profit or lose you the original stake. So we are going to depart from the advised trading in the report and use Fairbot’s interactive features to place an even trade.

The screen shot below shows our selection, but we’ve ticked the “Trading” box up near the top middle of the screen. Just underneath that there is an “offset” of 50 (ticks) that is basically 50 listed prices between the back and the lay bet.

There’s a back bet of £2 at the current odds of 2.94, not yet placed, and a trade lay of £2.98 at odds of 1.97 which is 50 ticks shorter. This gives us a £0.99/£0.98 balanced profit. In other words, if the lay bet is matched, we have “greened up” the bet before even placing it. You could, if you prefer, also untick the “Lock Offset” and “Smart Bets” options and adjust these figures manually. (“Smart Bets” means that Fairbot works out the best stake to even up or “green” the profit). We’ll leave the options selected so that Fairbot works it out automatically for us.

The back bet is matched and the lay bet is waiting for the race to go in-play.

The horse shortened, as expected, the lay bet was matched, the selected horse lost, but thanks to the automatic “greening up” we still made our £0.98 profit.

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Above, there’s another race with the selection in the same sort of price range as the last one. So we stuck with our 50 ticks offset. We are set to make a profit of £1.04 whatever happens, so long as the horse shortens enough. But this time we have set a “Stop Loss”, if the horse goes out by 40 ticks. (see the top middle right of the screen)

So the back bet is matched and waiting for the in-play we have an unmatched lay bet at shorter odds (for a “greened-up” profit) OR a pending bet at longer odds (to reduce the loss if the short lay odds are not met). The software works out the optimum stake to use to reduce the potential loss. Here we see the real power of trading using Fairbot. We have taken the basic Double, Zero or Bust of the Dobbing Secrets system and now have a 1½; 1½ , or ½ loss. According to the Dobbing Secrets report we should get the shorter odds on our selections 75% of the time. So in every 100 races we should get a ½ point profit in 75 races and a ½ point loss in 25 races.

The selected horse didn’t win and didn’t shorten to the required odds. So we got the stop loss trigger in for £1.04 loss (roughly ½ point loss)

Above, is another race. The back odds are higher than the other races at 6.0 so we set the offset to 20 ticks to give us a green up profit of £1. And then the stop loss is set to trigger if the horse goes out 20 ticks.

This gives us a £1 profit, £1 profit, or £0.80 loss situation.

The shorter lay bet was matched and the horse lost to give us a £1 profit.

So there we have it. We have a clever selection process, with Dobbing Secrets, combined with the use of Fairbot to trade in a way that maximises profits and minimises losses. Using Fairbot’s trade and stop loss as described, you can expect to make 25 points profit in every 100 races. You can set up these trades before racing starts and they will automatically trade for a profit or the stop loss will reduce the losses.

I hope I have made this clear enough to be understood. If anyone has any questions, I’ll try to answer them if you post them in the comments section.

Rich Lyne