You may remember right back to either the first or second issue of “SkyBlueKangaroo” when I was about to interview Henry McAnenly?
He made the point that the really important stuff – the stuff you absolutely must get correct in your betting business – is all very, very simple.
What you need to do is this:
- Back horses at ‘value’ prices.
- Lay horses when they are ‘over-bet’.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2.
Remember? I called this my “Clover System” because it had three components, each represented by a leaf on a clover.
Always looking for value is one of those betting skills that could literally explode your bottom line… but sadly it’s a skill most people ignore, because they just do not “get it”. It simply doesn’t make sense to them.
Someone said to me recently “A bet isn’t any value at all when it loses. And the price doesn’t matter when your horse wins.”
This is totally true…. when you are looking at one bet in isolation.
The aim is to be making profit over 1000′s of bets, not just one
None of us should be looking at one bet in isolation – instead we are in the game to make money over a period of time and by placing hundreds and thousands of individual bets.
To illustrate, let’s look at the good old example of betting on the toss of a coin – the perfect (no hair-splitting please) 50% winning chance.
If I offered you a price of 4/6 odds on for Heads, would you place a bet with me?
You might do, if and only if we were only going to flip the coin just the once time.
You will either win or lose.
But if we were going to flip that coin 100 times, there is no way you would accept the price of 4/6 on a 50/50 chance.
Why?
Because you know that after 100 coin flips you would almost definitely have lost money.
Equally, if I were offering you a price of 6/4 for Heads on 100 coin flips, you would bite my arm off, because you would be practically guaranteed a profit.
[box]The point is this, if you consistently back horses at prices too high compared to their actual chance of winning then you will make a profit in the long run.[/box]
And, if you consistently lay horses at prices too low compared to their actual chance of winning then you will also make a profit in the long run.
It all comes down to value.
That’s great Paul, we get the point about making a profit by betting consistently with a value price ….but how the hell do you know whether the price on a horse is a value price or not?
How many of you have been screaming that question out loud!?
Well, unfortunately that question is almost impossible to answer with total confidence. If it were, then someone would have written a computer program to calculate the precise probability of a horse winning a particular race. But it’s impossible.
Assessing a race takes considerable experience, skill at reading form, and judgement. But ultimately any assessment of a race will only ever be an opinion and everyone has different opinions. And opinions in horse racing, however well informed, will always be subject to the vaguaries of racing.
Only yesterday, I was listening to the commentary before a particular race. The pundits spent around five minutes discussing the chances of various horses, before coming to the conclusion that the favourite would win.
The tape went up, the horses all set off on the 3 mile race, and within 70 yards and even before reaching the first fence, the favourite stumbled and unseated the jockey.
No more than a few seconds into a three mile race! You just cannot factor things like that into your calculations.
But there is one very simple way to elevate yourself above 98% of the other punters who don’t even bother to evaluate prices when they bet.
Here’s a quick and simple method to assess value
The Racing Post is arguably the country’s leading horse racing publication. They employ experts to give racing advice to their readership. The advice has to be half way decent to secure the ongoing readership.
The Racing Post also employs expert race readers to compile forecast Starting Prices for every race run in the UK. For the reasons already given, these forecast prices will never be 100% accurate but more often than not they come very close.
So here is a simple method to help you determine whether a horse can be considered a “value bet”….
If your chosen horse is available to back at a price higher than the Racing Post forecast price, you can consider it a “value” bet.
If the price on your chosen horse is below the Racing Post forecast, it may well still have a good chance of winning, but you might consider it not to be a profitable bet, and let in run unbacked.
When looking to lay a horse to lose, the opposite applies, ie. if your selection is priced below the Racing Post forecast, you can consider it a good value bet.
If you adopt this method, you may well find yourself watching horses you may well have otherwise backed, go on to win. This will be frustrating at times.
But I once heard it said that….
If you are willing to accept missing the occasional short-priced winner, you will never have to suffer the pain of another short-priced loser.
The method described above is far from scientific, and maybe even a little over-simplistic. But it is still a giant leap forward from betting blindly at any price.
Discipline yourself to only risk your money when you have the odds in your favour and you will find your bottom line profits improving.
