Money Management in Horse Racing Betting

In order to understand how we can profit from our betting we need to understand our personal betting patterns. As I’m sure you’re aware, if you back blindly and don’t keep records of all your bets then you’ll end up broke.

But…

Why Keep Records?

From personal experience I would say that this is one of the most important things that I do. I keep an excel sheet of everything I bet upon and have a different one for every angle/system that I use. At the end of every two week period I set aside a few hours and go through every single bet that I placed and look over the race of where the bet was placed, looking for anything that I may have missed and why it may have been a bad bet or a good bet.

By keeping records, I’m able to fully understand where I can improve my betting and more importantly understand where my profit is coming from. This is how I break down my accounts from any new angles/systems that I have started to use in my portfolio.

Let’s say that we are going to start recording our bets from the simple method of form reading. We start about by selecting our bets for the day, specialising in, let’s say, handicap chases during the NH season only. So it’s the beginning of November and we have two horses we believe will run well based upon their previous form. We need to record the following information about these bets:

1.                    Date and time of race
2.                    Horses name
3.                    Trainer & jockey
4.                    The price that you bet at or SP
5.                    Whether or not the bet was a winner or loser
6.                    What your profit/ returns were for the bet
7.                    Keep a record of your overall bank
8.                    A little note as to why you thought the horse would win

By keeping all the information above in a little notebook or using excel you will have a clearer picture of how you are performing throughout the jumps season.

Ok so you have all this information gathered and it’s the end of the season.

What You Do With It

You need to now look at the patterns that will be apparent from the collected information. Where did you seem to perform better? We’re there times you weren’t very sure?

Going back over this information will help you understand where you may have gone wrong in your betting and where it can be improved. The most important thing to look at in your records is the prices you have been betting to.

Let’s say that you had 100 bets during the season. You managed to find 30 winners and the other 70 were losers.

You have now established your strike rate. This will be 30% , a great strike rate but if your average odds are about 9/4 then you will have lost a few quid!

How do we work this out?

We need to add up all the odds of the horses we have bet on, even the losers, and then divide this by our 100 bets. Let’s say the average price comes to 7/2. We now know that our form reading skills will show a profit to level stakes of around 35%. Here’s the math:

7 divided by 2 = 3.5 plus 1(this is our stake) = 4.5

4.5 multiplied by 30(this is our strike rate/ how many winners we have found) = 135

The above illustrates that if we were betting to £1 stakes on our system we would be 35 quid to the good at the end of the season and we can therefore use this in our betting portfolio come next season.

Have a look at some of the losing bets and whilst looking at the results ( I personally use the racing post on-line results service) try to find where maybe you could have not had a bet because of the competition?

There are many ways to improve your betting and start making money in the long run if you start keeping records. This way you can start to filter out any bad habits and improve your performance.

Any questions then please leave me a message below.