REVERSED SLIDE: A 4-Step Framework To Being Successful in Horse Racing

Losing streaks in horse racing is almost taboo. Nobody talks about it.

Tipsters don’t like to talk about it because they live by only marketing their winners.

Which doesn’t mean that they don’t find losers. They do. But they don’t shout about it.

In fact, nobody shouts about losing streaks in horse racing, except for the Race Advisor.

But losing streaks can make you more profit than anything else.

Heck, losing streaks in horse racing are so powerful they can turn you profitable if you’re not already!

I call this the Reversed Slide.

In this blog post, I’m going to explain it to you, step-by-step.

---

DOES THE REVERSED SLIDE ACTUALLY WORK?

The name is something I’ve only come up with recently, and I’ll explain why I came up with it in a moment.

But first, I wanted to explain why it works.

The Reversed Slide is not a horse racing selection strategy or system, or a method to rate a horse.

It’s a mindset.

It’s a way of looking at horse racing, or a horse racing strategy, completely differently.

I first realised, back around 2009, that the reason I wasn’t making a profit wasn’t because I couldn’t find winners. This realisation led me to dig into what was happening.

I came to a conclusion… it was primarily linked to bankroll and money management.

Except, I had thought that my money management was pretty good, I was kinda proud of it.

I was clearly missing something key in there. I browsed forums, read from some of the great bettors, both new and old, and couldn’t find anything that I was doing wrong.

Which is when I discovered it had to be how I was thinking. I must be approaching it wrong, So I began to reframe how I thought, and that’s when the break-through happened.

Over the rest of this blog, I’m going to share the entire approach with you, and at the end, I’d love to hear your feedback on it in the comments.

---

WHY I CALLED IT THE REVERSE SLIDE

A traditional slide is meant to be fun. We play with them as children.

You get up the steps quickly, this is the shortest journey and is tightly controlled by you as you go safely from one step to another. Then enjoy you come down the longer slide part, in an uncontrolled fashion. The fun is because sliding is uncontrolled.

For horse racing bettors it’s not quite the same journey.

Because of the way odds work, profit usually doesn’t take very long. Just two or three winners can create a large profit, very similar to the shorter journey of the steps you have to climb to get to the top of the slide.

That profit is followed by a long, unhappy, uncontrolled, slide down the losing streak on the other side.

This is difficult for anyone to deal with.

Whatever way we look at it, we’re going to get losing streaks in betting, so we need to make that manageable, and even possibly use the losing streaks to make us a long-term profit.

What we’d rather have is the reversed slide!

You reverse the slide. You go up the slide part, slow and gradual, for your profit, and go down the steps, controlled and shorter, for your losing streak

This is a slide where the slide, rather than the steps, is the journey of profit, and is the greater part of the journey. The steps down, the shorter part of the slide, become the losing streak and much easier to control.

We spend the majority of the time going up the slide, making a steady profit. Using regular, repeatable processes, we climb that profit slide until we reach the top.

Once we’re at the top, we can see the steps down, the losing streak, the other side.

We know this is coming. We’re aware of it. This time however, we’re not sliding down it uncontrolled. We’re taking it step-by-step, completely aware of what each step will bring.

---

REVERSED SLIDE: Secret #1

What follows is going to change your perception of how you should build betting strategies and find horse racing selections.

Ask any bettor, who hasn’t read this, what their primary focus is when they start looking for a horse to bet on. What they are trying to find.

The answer will always be:

“I’m trying to find the winner”

It’s a reasonable response. But it’s the wrong one if you want to be successful playing this game.

The answer should be:

“I’m trying to find the Contenders in this race“

There are so few races where there’s only one horse with a serious chance of winning that it’s not worth talking about.

In the majority of races there will always be more than one horse with the possibility of winning.

So it’s time to stop looking for a single horse that is going to be the winner.

You may find them occasionally but, more often than not, you won’t.

Looking for the “winning” horse is how most people bet, and most people aren’t successful at horse racing.

Change this focus in your mind when you look at a race, and you’ll see the impact instantly. Go and do it on a race you’ve already found the “winning” horse for today, and you’ll discover the other Contenders in that race almost immediately.

The race hasn’t changed, your focus has, and now you will start to see a bigger picture than before.

---

REVERSED SLIDE: Secret #2

Losing streaks are your friends.

All bettors are scared.

We’re scared we won’t find a successful approach.

We’re scared that the successful method we’re using will stop working.

We’re scared that if we share what we’re doing then we’ll give away our edge.

We’re scared of what people will think of us when we say we’ve got a winning method.

We’re scared of the losing streak that we know is just around the corner.

Everything we’re scared of hampers our success.

It’s time to face those fears. It’s time to stop being scared. It’s time to use our fears as part of our core framework for successful horse racing betting, so that they fuel our success rather than hinder us.

To do this we need to start with the biggest fear of most horse racing bettors… the losing streak that may never end.

This ties into secret #3 as well, but more on that in the next section.

Right now we need to dig deep into why losing streaks scare us.

I remember, a number of years ago, a new method I was testing which was working very well. Then the dreaded losing streak hit.

Five losers and I thought, that’s no problem.

Ten losers and I started to get a bit concerned.

Fifteen losers and the profits I had made were well eaten into.

Twenty losers and the profits were nearly gone.

Twenty five losers and I was eating into my original bankroll.

I never got any further, I stopped at that point.

The reason I stopped following that method was 100% due to emotions. There was not a shred of evidence that the method itself was failing, but I didn’t have the mindset to endure the losing streak.

This is the classic slide.

We climb profits fast (going up the steps) with a few winners at good odds.

Then we slide down the losing streak in an uncontrollable manner, with no concept of whether the slide ends in a warm pool or a river with crocodiles.

To use the reversed slide, we start by accepting losing streaks are going to happen.

If you can accept that, then we need to answer a simple question.

How many losers in a row am I comfortable with?

This question is the gateway.

For me, I’m happy with around ten losers in a row.

Most horse racing bettors are happy with between 5 and 10 losing bets in a row.

This means that any strategy we use needs to have a strike rate, the percentage of winners we find to bets placed, higher than 50%, with the majority of people needing 65% or higher.

Yet, this doesn’t align with the strike rates most of us would think of as good when looking at tipsters or other products.

Usually we’d consider anything above 20% good, and anything higher than 30% excellent.

That may well be.

However, it doesn’t matter how excellent it is, if we’re unable to cope with the losing streaks that those selections will provide.

Because, if you can’t manage the losing streak in your mind, then however profitable the horse racing selections may be, you’ll never make a profit because you won’t last through the losing streaks or the downswings.

Understanding ourselves is key to being able to use the reversed slide, and come down the losing streaks one step at a time, completely controlled.

A 20% strike rate could result in 31 or more losing bets in a row, without a winner.

I don’t know many people who could cope with that once in a year, let alone multiple times!

In summary, secret #2 is being honest with yourself by answering how many losers you are comfortable with.

Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you could cope with any number. Everybody has a limit. It may be high, but you will have a limit.

There’s no shame if the number is small, two or three is a very common answer.

Until you have this number you can’t start climbing your reversed slide, because you will always be uncontrollably sliding down the losing streaks.

---

REVERSED SLIDE: Secret #3

Build your betting bridge.

The reversed slide is… well… reversed!

Use that process to become successful.

We tend to start by trying to achieve our end goal in one step.

STEP 1: We’re not making a profit

STEP 2: We’re making a profit

That’s like trying to jump over the Grand Canyon without building a bridge.

If you try and find winners without doing the background work first, then you’re going to make that jump, realise there’s no bridge to support you, and come crashing down.

You’ve already put the foundations for your bridge in place using secret #2.

Now we need to start putting the ropes and boards in place to make it safe to walk on.

Our goal is to put enough rope and boards together to get to the other side. We’re not going to do it with a single piece of rope and one board. We going to use lots and connect them.

The other side of the bridge contains our long-term profits.

Right now, we’re building the bridge to get there.

The first boards need to connect the edge of the cliff to the strike rate we need to stay below the number of losers in a row we’re comfortable with.

Which means deciding on bet type.

Assuming we’re aiming for a strike rate of 65%, which is the most common, then we have to decide next, which bet type is going to suit us best.

Of course we could do this using back bets, but we’d be focusing on shorter odds horses, with a lot being odds-on.

If you don’t like betting on those types of horses, then we need to decide a different type of bet. All of these could achieve that strike rate:

• Place betting
• Each-way betting
• Dutch betting
• 80/20 betting
• Lay betting

By choosing the way you’re going to bet, you’re already starting to build your own framework for betting success.

But remember, while our final goal is long-term profit, we’ve got to achieve the smaller goals in order to be able to build our bridge to get there.

The first of those goals is to achieve a strike rate that allows us to use the reversed slide to make steady profits, and step into the losing streaks in a completely controlled way, knowing exactly what to expect.

---

REVERSED SLIDE: Secret #4

Confidence in yourself.

The truth is that when most bettors follow a betting strategy or selections they don’t have confidence in them.

They’re waiting for the selections to make a loss.

Of course there’s the hope that they won’t, but the expectation is that the tipster will fail.

You’re buying into something that you’re expecting to fail.

Which means when the losing selections come, your suspicions are confirmed and you stop using them.

By doing this, you are setting yourself up to fail.

Any horse racing selection process, whether your own or someone else’s, will have losing selections.

As we saw in secret #2, they could have losing streaks of 31 or more and still be achieving long-term profits. But we’ll never see those profits, because we have our belief that they’re going to fail confirmed, as soon as there are a few losing bets in a row.

If we want to continue our bridge building, then we need to have confidence.

Without any doubt the easiest person to have confidence in is ourselves!

That’s why we use a Foundational Strategy approach at the Race Advisor.

I’ll explain more about that in another post…

You’ve already begun to build the bridge, and know that long-term profit is the ultimate goal. However, we’re beginning by aiming to achieve a certain strike rate or higher, because if we don’t achieve that, we can’t use the reversed slide, and we’ll never get the first rope and boards of our bridge laid down.

It’s very likely that your selections will make a loss initially, but when we’ve got a few more boards down on our bridge, we can start to look at turning it into profit.

First, we’ve got to be in control of the losing streaks.

Following the process of building your bridge is going to do something incredibly important. It’s going to do something that you cannot have horse racing success without.

It’s going to give you confidence.

This is critical to your success.

None of us want to lose money while we’re building our bridge to the Reversed Slide stage.

Which is why you should use Aldermist, the Race Advisor’s LikeReal Racing platform, to test the bet types you want to use, and get your strike rate to the point that you’re comfortable with.

Building your confidence when your money is at stake is difficult. You’ll make decisions that are emotionally driven and not data driven. It’s natural, we all do it. That’s why we want to take our money out of the equation, until we know that every board in our bridge is ready to walk on.

---

THE REVERSED SLIDE IN SUMMARY

The reversed slide has come together over more than a decade in betting, and working with other bettors on their strategies.

It’s the first stage of becoming successful in horse racing. It gives our bridge to long-term profits its anchor point. We take our first tentative steps across it, we gain confidence and pride in our workmanship.

This model will allow you to take control of your losing streaks, by understanding yourself, and working to turn the longest part of the slide into the profit periods for your strategy. A strategy that will be unique to you, will work for you, and won’t be affected by anybody else.

The reversed slide is the first part of a new framework for being a successful horse racing bettor, that I am putting together, to make it quicker and easier than ever before to learn the skills of horse racing betting.

I’d love to hear your feedback on it in the comments below.