Easy Profiting From Dutch Betting With 1 Rating

Would you like to win 58% of all your bets without thinking?

This thread began running in my brain because of the forum post left by Alex here.

He asked:

Also can anyone tell me the historical strike rate of the top 3 in pr odds

The PR Odds, if you’re not currently an RA Pro member, is an artificial intelligent algorithm which scores every horse in the race. Then it works out the probability of the horse finishing (and shows you), before telling you which are the Contenders, Potentials and Eliminations, and the recommended minimum odds.

We then merge these odds, which is based purely from the information in our database, with the live Betfair data, to give you value odds.

Phew.

Sound like a lot of effort?

It is if you’re doing it by hand.

Luckily, inside our software, it simply looks like this:

If you’re not yet a member, you can get your trial here.

The top three horses, based on the Contenders column, have found the winner 58% of the time since 2018.

Great. But that doesn’t help you make a profit.

Which, if we’re being honest, is all we’re really interested in!

Don’t fret, I’m going to tell you.

But first, I’d like to talk about dutching.

---

What is dutch betting or dutching?

Both myself, and other writers on the blog, have written a fair amount about dutch betting over the years, because it’s one of my personal favourite ways of betting.

Just a few examples are:

Should You Go Dutch? A Guide to ‘Dutching’ in Horse Racing

Dutching The Forecast

Dutching: A Way To Make Your Betting Pay

Guide To Profitable Dutching

And I can be pretty certain that I’ll write about it again in the future.

That’s because dutch betting will:

• Reduce your risk
• Increase your strike rate
• Produce shorter losing streaks

Each of these three things make a huge psychological impact on your ability to continue placing the bets and following an approach.

You should never under estimate the benefit of reducing potential downswings, even if it costs you some of your future profit.

For most people it’s a very worthwhile cost. It can be the difference between long-term success or failure.

But back to dutch betting, and what it is.

Quite simply, it’s…

The spreading of your stake across multiple horses in a race so that if one of the horses wins you make a profit

Fairly simple.

Since Betfair introduced the ability to calculate dutch stakes when placing a bet on the Exchange with them, it makes it super easy to place the bets as well.

Of course, you can dutch bet in different markets, and there are hundreds of adjustments you can make.

But I like to keep things simple.

We’re going to be looking at win markets only, and I won’t be using any adjustments.

---

Why winning isn’t important

I’ll come to the approach shortly, but we need to go through this first..

Until a bettor understands that winning isn’t important, they will be chasing the wrong thing in their betting.

Chasing the wrong thing in your betting = losing.

If you’ve got any questions on this.

If you’ve got any questions on anything in this blog post, please leave a comment to let me know and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

Winning isn’t important because…

Winning does not necessarily equal a long-term profit.

If that doesn’t make sense, please temporarily stop betting and ask me as many questions as you like until it does make sense.

Because if it doesn’t make sense to you, you’ll never make a long-term profit, and ultimately you’ll always be gambling, not investing.

You could win 80% of your bets and make a long-term loss, while someone else winning 5% of their bets makes a long-term profit.

That’s because everything is dictated by the odds.

If you won 80% of the time, but were taking odds of 1.01 each time, you’d never make a profit, because you wouldn’t be winning enough money eighty percent of the time to cover your losses.

Whether you win 5%, 10% or 80% of the time, you have to be getting enough back from your winning bets to cover your losing bets and make a profit.

If you don’t, you’ll be permanently, and forever, losing.

Oh yeah, there’ll be the individual celebration. The odd day or two when everything wins and you feel like a king.

But it will be quickly replaced by the inevitable losers that will follow.

You should always, with no exceptions, be focused on making a long-term profit, not picking the winning horse.

A long term profit is created by making sure you achieve the highest odds possible for your bets. So high that they cover your losing bets and still leave you some left over.

It’s not a black magic, or some special art you need to be initiated into.

It’s mathematics. The bookmakers use it, and so must you.

---

Profiting from dutching

Now that we know what dutching, or dutch betting, is, and that we should be focusing on profit not winning…

…let’s look at how we can profit from dutching.

We already know that you can use the Contenders from our PR Odds and win 58% of the time.

It could be 75% or 35%, the only truly important piece of information in that strike rate is that your losing streaks should be fairly manageable with that rate of winning.

But does it make us money?

On paper the answer is yes!

If you’d just bet the top three contenders from our PR Odds since 2018 this is what would have happened.

10713	Winners
18327	Races
58.45%	SR
1.710725287	Avg. Odds Dutch based on SR
2834.0925	Profit
15.46%	ROI
1.782221429	Avg. Odds
1.04	A/E
10283	Expected Winners

Waddya reckon? Pretty damn good!

The winner was in that top three just over 58% of the time.

A profit of +2834 points to one unit stakes is pretty good over two years by anybody’s definition, particularly when aligned with a 15% return on investment.

The average expected profit on a dutch bet would be 71% of your stake, and there’s an A/E (or PIV) of 1.04 or 4%.

But don’t run off and start implementing this straight away.

Because, as always with betting, things are not quite what they seem.

Yes, it’s true those figures have been made. What I haven’t yet shown, and am about to, is how.

And that is crucial to your profitability.

Which is why I’m always banging on about understanding the process of selection, the downswings, the bankroll required and the risks.

They are key elements to your success.

An unscrupulous marketer may take those numbers, advertise them and drive hundreds of people onto a tipping service.

In that situation I would expect every single person to lose money.

How?

Like this…

Why you MUST ALWAYS understand how a selection process works

Let me show you a graph of the profits since 2018 for the above.

Would you want to follow this overly simple selection process now?

I doubt it.

Most of the profit were made over the course of a three month period, and since then it’s been on the decline.

That one piece of information should have changed everything you thought about the selection process from a few seconds ago.

There’s no odds limit, so a lot of the profit comes from higher odds horses.

Which means there are huge downswings.

In this example, the downswing is around a year in.

The selections are still beating the market, so I’d expect it to pick up again at some point, but it could be another few months, maybe longer. How long is anybody’s guess. But as long as the selections continue to beat the odds, we know at some point it will come back out of the downswing, probably when a few horses with odds in the hundreds win.

Does that mean it’s a bad strategy or selection process?

Nope.

However, I don’t know of anybody who’d be able to consistently continue betting on selections one year into a continuous downswing.

What this means is…

The strategy isn’t suitable for most people, not that it won’t make a profit.

And the difference is extremely important.

Too often we get mixed up between a non-profitable strategy, and a strategy that doesn’t suit us.

A simple way to determine if a strategy is likely to be profitable ongoing, is to see if your selections are continuously beating the SP.

If you’re not sure how to do that, then please leave me a comment below to let me know, and I’ll write another blog post about it.

Can we make this a strategy that suits us?

Bearing in mind that all we’ve done is taken the top three contenders in every single race, straight out of the PR Odds ratings, and found 58% winners and an edge, the answer is almost certainly going to be yes.

After all, if we can’t find a profitable segment of a profitable selection process which bets in around 33 races per day, then we’re doing something wrong.

Without even adding in any extra information, but simply doing an odds analysis, we get this…

Odds Range	Winners	Bets	SR	Profit	A/E
<= 1.50	534	727	73%	-36.75	0.96
<= 2.00	1104	1925	57%	-14.07	1.01
<= 2.50	1058	2414	44%	-93.02	0.99
<= 3.00	1171	3117	38%	-0.96	1.03
<= 4.00	1808	6224	29%	-109.01	1.02
<= 5.00	1349	5850	23%	-46.51	1.03
<= 10.00	2858	18124	16%	721.89	1.08
<= 15.00	619	6918	9%	150.86	1.08
<= 20.00	242	3640	7%	330.62	1.14
<= 25.00	113	1967	6%	439.74	1.27
<= 50.00	125	3279	4%	663.11	1.24
> 50.00	35	2401	1.46%	985.4	1.4

As expected, based on the graph, the majority of profits come from the higher odds. A third of the profits have come from horses with odds of more than 50 with a 1.46% strike rate.

As we’ve mentioned, this isn’t going to be suitable for anybody. At least nobody that I know of.

However, there is a sweet spot in the odds range of >5.00 and <=10.00.

In this odds range we get a 16% strike rate, and have made 721 points proit.

Of course, based on the graph we can see a big profit was made in the early part of 2018 after a particularly good run.

So taking 2018 out of the results when looking at this specific odds range, we still generate a profit of +135 units, and the A/E reduces slightly to 1.06.

But it’s a truly excellent start.

Do you think you could take an approach which makes a decent base profit using two rules and one rating, and improve on it?

I know you can!

---

Here’s some of the ways I’d improve the profits…

• Cross check the horses ability to race over the current race conditions.

As you probably know, this is something I recommend whatever the strategy or situation,

The power of spending five minutes doing this is so hugely under-estimated by the majority of bettors. It’s often the difference between them making a profit or loss.

• Use more ratings to narrow down the selections further

You don’t want to use hundreds of ratings, usually anywhere from three to eight is about right.

If you’re using more than ten ratings, you’re probably using too many. Consider reducing the number of ratings you’re using.

However, using more than one is certainly beneficial. Even when that one is pretty damn good 😉

• Consider only betting when the odds offer value

You can only be a profitable bettor if you’re betting on value odds. To this end, you can look at using the Race Advisor’s merged tissue line, or your own tissue odds to determine whether the odds available are offering value.

• Run analysis using tools such as the Monte Carlo Simulator

Backing up your initial opinion with another tool can be a very good way of confirming the strength of the selection.

I would always use this in conjunction with cross-checking whether the horse has previously performed well over the race conditions. In fact I would use everything here alongside that.

---

What would you do?

Now that you have this knowledge, and approach, in your hands. What would you do with it?

Maybe you’re already doing something similar.

Perhaps you never thought of this, and it’s something you’re going to try out.

Whatever the case, I’d love to know. Please leave me a message in the comment below, and let me know how you’d approach using this technique.

EDIT: I’ve added a download of the raw data if you’re interested in taking a look at it.

---

Here’s what happened yesterday!

Purely looking at the top three Contenders from the PR Odds at each of the three UK tracks yesterday, gave these results.

I did not do any of the improving profits recommendations. To be clear, I do not suggest using this approach without implementing some of them for the reasons I have already outlined.

Fontwell

12:30 Jimmy won @ 8/1

13:00 Christmas In April won @ 4/5

13:30 Zamani won @ 5/2

14:00 Quaranta won @ 5/4 (Bally Longford fell at odds between 5.00 and 10.00)

14:30 losing race

15:00 Hugo’s Reflection won @ 9/2

15:30 losing race

One of the top three contenders won in five out of seven races for a 71% strike rate.

There were two winners at SP odds in the range 5.00 to 10.00, and one race where a selection was available in the odds range but lost.

Uttoxeter

12:40 losing race

13:10 losing race

13:40 Bullionaire won @ 4/9 (Nautical Star was available at odds between 5.00 and 10.00)

14:10 Tidal Flow won @ 5/4

14:40 Good And Hardy won @ 8/11

15:10 Taste The Fear won @ 4/1

One of the top three contenders won in four out of six races for a 83% strike rate.

There was one winner at SP odds in the range 5.00 to 10.00, and one race where a selection was available in the odds range but lost.

Wolverhampton

15:45 losing race

16:15 Millicient Fawcett won @ 9/4 (Regal Lilly was available at odds between 5.00 and 10.00)

16:45 Colouring won @ 5/1

17:15 Aloysius Lilius won @ 13/2

17:45 losing race

18:15 losing race

18:45 Noble Behest won @ 9/4 (Grey Mist was available at odds between 5.00 and 10.00)

19:15 losing race

One of the top three contenders won in four out of eight races for a 50% strike rate.

There were two winner at SP odds in the range 5.00 to 10.00, and two races where a selection was available in the odds range but lost.

---

Take advantage of our trial, and become a member of the Race Advisor Pro Members Club today.