Testing A New System

Guest article by Malcolm Pett from Greyhorse Bot

One of my great loves is trying to figure out betting systems. Yes I know that there are people that think they don’t work and there are others that think they only work short term etc, etc.

To be honest…I sort of…don’t care what people think! I just like trying to find things that work and often I have, but I am not going to lie…the guys who try to sell you a “Simple System” to follow are not doing you any favours because the good ones are not generally that easy to do!

Sometimes I have these crazy ideas and I wanted to tell you about one I am trying at the moment, although a pre-warning that this is really not for the faint hearted wouldn’t go amiss and to make things worse it involves using staking progressive staking.

This will not be everyone’s “cup of tea” and I will admit it isn’t often that I use progressive staking systems myself now-a-days but I knew with this idea it would need something drastic to work.

Just making that statement is probably a good enough reason for not trying this but I decided to throw caution to the wind.

Using the Grey Horse Bot (http://www.greyhorsebot.co.uk) means you can bet under £2.00 and put in a stop-loss that would protect me should it really go bonkers.

I then decided that in order to really prove the system could work I was going to start with a very small bank and see how quickly I could build it up, so I started with just £8.

To be honest at first although I didn’t make much profit (I didn’t lose any) I needed to refine some of the system parameters and decide on the stake and stop loss size. After a few days of testing I settled on what I considered to be the best settings.

Up until now I haven’t really told you much about the system, this then is a good time to let you know a little more about what I am doing.

The actual selections come from a rating system I found on the net that was meant to find winners. While testing the selections on the place market (they were meant to be win bets) I realised that they were losing quite a lot of the time and this is when I decided to swap to lays, on the place market!

Now to be very honest I must admit that I haven’t bothered to check if the selections make profit laying to level stakes but I am pretty sure they wont…I just have a feeling about it…and I guess I am going to get days when I hit my stop loss…but I haven’t yet.

As I am using a staking system then being cautious about the stake size is important because it can quickly get out of hand, my normal lay size is 1% of my bank although it would be advisable to use even less when testing a system like this.

This is a high risk strategy but there is no need to go stupid so my stop/loss is set to 20% of my bank. This means in theory I could have 4 losing days and still have enough money in my bank to keep on betting. You would have to be mad to continue after 2 or 3 losing days because I think it would be clear by then that the system really doesn’t work!

Since starting the testing I have changed the number of runners from 8 to 30 because I noticed on a couple of occasions that we were caught out by Betfair’s “No Place reduction payout” if there were non runners.

The price range is set from 1.02 to 3.00 and we stop monitoring the market at the off (another lesson learned when we followed the prices in running) although I have been considering increasing the lower end to 1.40 because we haven’t won on more than a couple of runners under that price (maybe another system).

Apart from that the only other setting I am using on the Grey Horse Bot (http://www.greyhorsebot.co.uk) is to “Ignore race if P/L has not been settled”. There is nothing worse than increasing your stake when you don’t need to and this setting only bets if you have had a settlement from the last race you bet on.

Grey Horse Bot subscribers can get all the information they need about running these selections from the bonus section of the member’s area.

I will let you know next month how the testing is going.

Malcolm