Advice

Stop Looking For Winners If You Want To Make Profits

If you have looked at the title and thought that I am going mad then bear with me. I promise that if you read through this post then the way you analyse races is going to completely change. Not only that but if you implement what you learn then your profits are going to soar.

One of the most difficult obstacles in sports betting is overcoming the need to get instant wins. This desire that we all have to get a winner drives us to look for the winners when we are analysing a race. If you want to make a profit then looking for winners is the last thing that you want to do.

There are very few races where it is possible to say that one horse is significantly better than all the other horses in the field. It is much more often the case that there are a number of horses who all have the potential to win.

In order to do this you need to start looking at the race as a whole. In my experience this is impossible to do if you are trying to find winners. When looking for winners the brain goes into a mode of working that looks for single factors under each runner that may contribute and it takes you away from the big picture. You need to take a step back.

The first thing that you need to do is to look at all the runners in the race and see which ones you think have absolutely no chance of winning. Remove these from your list or put a big X next to them if you use a paper.

When you are first starting out I would suggest that if after removing these runners you still have more than 10 horses in the field then moving on to the next race. The more runners there are then the harder it is to see the race as a whole.

Now that you have removed the horses that you think have no chance of winning I want you to decide on the 5 most important factors for this race.

For each of these factors look at the remaining runners and rank each of the runners according to how well you think they will perform.

You will now have five numbers next to each of your horses and it has become much easier to see the race as a whole. Now you need to write down how you think that the race is going to be run. What you expect to happen.

The last two sentences are the key because when you watch the race it is no longer relevant if your best horses won or if they got beaten by a nose. What is important is if the race was run as you expected it to be run. If it was then you are doing your job correctly and can move on to the next race. Stop looking for winners and start trying to analyse how a race is going to be run.

Analyse how a race is going to be run correctly and you will be very soon betting on the horses that make you a profit!

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.

2 Comments

  1. AAAAh now that is interesting. A bit like columns J,K,L,M in Reynolds spread sheet and the results to day, I will stick at looking for winners and not waste my time with empty cells which are not empty.
    Trace an empty cell back to the originating cell and it is not empty!

    Perhaps the CSV file needs to have 0’s instead of empty cells. And the video of Reynolds water Mathmatics needs to be redone as it is full of confusion. Once you have decyphered the ramblings, it works but failed to pick the right selections more than three times today. so it is as good as my picking the winners. It still has the empty cell problem.
    I think that is because: when the first few errors were ironed out they were not followed on down each column. So it has to be cell by cell cross referenced.
    If there is a grading system for the ‘Going’, I would like to add that to my columns as that is very important to me. i.e. what value is good and what value is yelding or Good to soft in Numerical terms?

    1. Hi Liam, thanks for the comment. If you have any questions about the strategy or the csv file then please feel free to post in the forum or get in touch through email.

      No strategy will find the winner every single time, our aim is to find them more often than their odds suggest they should win, this is where our profit is.

      Regarding the going, this is also something we should discuss in the members area, start a thread with these questions and I shall get back to you on them in detail.

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