A Free Angle

I thought I'd introduce you to a clever little trick today that you can use to follow the market and find a few winners. It involves following the money in a horse race and using it to your advantage. The below example relies on three principles. The horse has to be in the top four in the betting forecast, already been gambled on and still be in the top two most popular bets in the market according to Oddschecker. It's not difficult to find these three factors and you'll be amazed how many winners you'll find!

Firstly I look at the first four in the betting from the racing post's forecast as you'll see below:

As you can see this highlights 7 horses. The reason I choose the racing post's forecast is that it is very good at getting the market right. We now need to see if the horse has had money for it by heading over to At The Races.

On this page we will see that the below horses have had some money coming for them:

You'll see that Porters War and Another Trump have seen some money for them. However, looking at Porters War, he's not met our first criteria of being in the top four of the betting forecast.

We now head over to Oddschecker and look at the pie chart at the bottom of the odds table and we see this:

As you can see from this the money is around equal for Porters War and Another Trump. The only horse from the two that has met all three factors is Another Trump so this is the selection.

The results are as follows:

As always, I only recommend playing around with this concept with paper money and when you feel comfortable with it and have shown a profit on paper, should you use it as part of your portfolio. As with anything to do with the market, it is always open to interpretation. Another Trump was ridden by A P McCoy so you could argue the money was coming from his legions of fans!?!

Let me know what you think in the comments box below and as always, leave me a question and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Regards,

Ed

Some VATR Stats and What's to Come!

Hello and welcome to any new readers here at the Value At The Races blog.

Please take some time to read my previous entries and of course the below ramblings!

I know some people are put off by the lack of explanation as to why I arrive at a selection on the daily advice e-mail. The purposes of this site are to help people understand that every tip I send out has been well thought out and represents value from the calculations that I use. I'd also like to add that the tips sent out are part of my daily portfolio and are backed by myself at all times.

Anyway back to the service and how it has performed over the last 12 months. The service went live on the 20th February 2012. We were well into the back end of the jumps season at this point and a lot of my energy was gearing itself up for the flat season. Suffice to say this flat season has been the hardest and most testing times of my professional punting career! I've still managed to turn a profit but there has been no holiday for myself and Mrs VATR!!

So as I'm sure you're aware we need to treat betting as a long term investment so here are some figures for the service, had you been with me from day one.

Start of service (20/02/12) till end of Feb: +11.70 Points
March: +36.37 Points
April: -4.624 Points
May: -17.989 Points
June: +16.239 Points
July: +5.666  Points
August: +10.508 Points
September: -10.802 Points
October till today (15/10/12); +20.808 Points

Total: + 67.858 Points

The cost of subscribing to the service would have cost you over that period of time 38.40 Points of your bank so your overall profit would have been 29.458 Points. I know that is not amazing but it is a profit and as part of a portfolio is certainly worth its contribution.

We are now coming into our 9th month of being live and I strongly believe that the service will continue to profit as we head into the jumps. I have been burning the midnight oil over the last two months and have unearthed every single profitable statistic for the jumps and the All Weather with trainers, jockeys, horses, going, tracks and combinations galore! Going on the data I have for the last 5 years I would be looking to make well over 60 points profit between now and the end of February 2013. A bold statement but every angle I use is different to that of the bookie so it is a proven fact that we will turn a profit.

I will be publishing another post later on today that will give you a bit more of an insight into how I arrive at my selections and how I interpret "Value" which will keep my service in profit over the years to come.

Any questions, please leave a comment and I will answer within 24 hours.

Regards,

Ed

An Insight Into My Selections

I thought I'd do a post about how I view the racing the night before racing and show you my ramblings about each card and what my views are.

Ayr is a weak meeting from a stats point of view, however it looks that Richard Fahey has a few lively ones and an inspection of the markets tomorrow morning should indicate which ones to side with. The two that catch the eye are Dutch Heritage and Cosmic Moon. They both have good bookings with their jockeys and the combined strike rates look to be the market play. Look for any value in the morning for two good bets.

Lingfield is an extremely dissapointing card and offers no interesting angles. However Saeed Bin Suroor's Mizbah in the 1710 looks to be a good chance with Dettori booked to ride. 11/4 at the time of writing looks a massive price about a horse that has shown not a lot on previous form apart from last time out, being very unlucky in running but ran on well to come second behind Enery. My tissue states anything above 6/4 to be a good bet.

Yarmouth has nothing to work with.

Wolverhampton only has the one eye catcher and that's the top weight in the 1900. Almaty Express from the John Weymes yard, who boasts a 15% SR at the track with a fairly impressive £63.50 profit to £1 level stakes. The horse loves it round here with no less than 17 wins and several placings. The handicapper may have him in his grip but 5/1 looks too big about a course specialist. Horses for courses as they say!

Uttoxeter shows nothing of interest.

So there you have it. I will now spend a few hours constructing a tissue about each race of interest and any horse that is a bigger price than I anticipate, it becomes a bet and a tip.

Any questions or views, please leave a comment and I'll respond as soon aa I can.

Regards,

Ed

A Day In The Life Of A Professional Gambler

In today's post, I thought I'd give you a perspective into a day in the life of a professional gambler.
So to begin, I want to explain that it's not an easy profession and is fraught with psychological pitfalls and is not as glamorous as people first think!

I start the day with breakfast (not unusual I hear you cry!) like most people. After a usual start to the day, I then sit down at my computer and the hard work starts.

Firstly I have to go through all the various selection processes I use with various systems. This can take up to three hours in itself and consists of running through the cards repeatedly looking for qualifying bets. Once I have all the data collected I then have to start reading the form of every horse in every handicap and then construct my own tissue and compare this with the morning markets. If I find a horse, I believe to be over-priced then it becomes a bet.

Then I post these value bets for my subscribers over at Value At The Races so they can benefit from the early prices.

So we're now around the 1100am mark and all the day's information is laid out in front of me. The next hardest task is to now try and get my bets on. Not as easy as you think!

Most Bookmakers have closed my accounts or limit my bets to a minimum, so it's a constant cat and mouse game I have to play. I obviously use the exchanges a lot as this makes my life easier but sometimes there isn't enough liquidity in the morning to place a large bet so I have to use a bookmaker. I have a few contacts who can place these bets for me and they are then paid a commission. Sometimes I'll even go into a shop and use cash, although nowadays it is easier to keep everything on-line.

Once the day's bets have been placed, I'll have some lunch and go for a walk or a swim. It's important to take your mind off racing and get some exercise as it helps to keep the mind focused.

Back to the afternoon and it's about trading through the various races and finding over-priced horses that I think will be over bet come the off. I'll back the horse at the over-priced odds and then lay them off to create a green book. In other words no matter what the outcome, I make a small profit. Do this on every race and it soon adds up!

It's very hard to stay focused throughout the afternoon and manage your time constructively but my wife does a good job of keeping me in check!

I still work part time for a large bookmakers which I thoroughly enjoy. I won't tell you what I do but I quietly work behind the scenes making sure bets are legitimate and we don't lose too much money.

Once the day's racing is over, which can obviously run into the evening, I then tally up everything that has been bet and work out my profit/loss for the day. Every single bet has to be recorded with explanations as to why they were placed and notes to be made about any future bets on the horse. I then kick back and relax for a few hours and then it's another day.

I do try to take one day off a week but invariably this type of work goes on for 7 days a week and consumes your whole life................. Good job I love it!!


Any questions then leave me a comment and I'll get back to you.

Regards,

Ed

Finding The Value

I thought I'd give you an idea today on how I arrive at my selections that are tipped on my service Value At The Races everyday.

By browsing through the posts on this blog you'll see my interpretation of that elusive "Value". All my selections are tipped as I believe they are over-priced. To date my selections have beaten the market 86% of the time.

Our current strike rate is 28.87% and the average odds are 9/2 with the average SP returning just over 7/2.

So I'm getting the Value bit right but how do I arrive at my selections?

Over 3 years ago now I read a book by Dave Nevison and I was fascinated by his approach to creating a "tissue" This meant pricing a race up with my own odds and then if the market was bigger than my price then I had found a bet.

Every evening or morning I select the handicaps I will be tackling and start looking through each declared runner. I break the race down into form reading, trainer and jockey strike rates and general trends from the last 10 years. Each horse is then given a rating and with this rating I then go about pricing up my book.

As long as I think the horse has a good chance of winning and the market is bigger than my "tissue" price then it becomes a "tip"

As an example I thought I'd run through my reasoning behind the 2035 @ Southwell this evening.

Selection: Beachwood Bay @ 4/1

The horse likes it around Southwell with three wins, a second and a third under his belt. Although not having won in a class 5 on this occasion I feel that it shouldn't be a problem having been fairly treated by the handicapper.

The trainer Jo Hughes is in terrific form at the moment with a 33% SR in the last 14 days. That's 2 winners from 6 and an overall, impressive 23% SR overall on the all weather. Delving a little deeper, Jo is showing a 15% SR with her horses over 6 furlongs which is a good SR in my book.

From looking at the other horses, I believe that Clear Spring to be the main danger but at the time of writing, 9/4 is way too short in what could be a fairly competitve affair. Using the above and implementing statistics with all the other horses I then arrived at the below "Tissue"

Punching  11/1

Salik Tag   8/1

Clear Spring  5/1

Beachwood Bay              3/1

Elhamri    20/1

Ace Of Spies     14/1

Tunnager Grove       5/1

Gracie´s Gift   10/1

Amber Moon

25/1


Now if you add all the percentages up on the above tissue you will notice that it's very close to a 100% (102.12%) . This is because I've not included an over round into my calculations like a bookmaker would. As you can see, I fancy Beachwood Bay and believe that the horse is a 3/1 shot. Having looked at the market this morning, I was able to get on at 4/1. I now have a value bet and we should get a good run for our money.

Any questions then please leave a comment below and I'll answer as soon as possible.

Regards,

Ed

Losing Runs And What To Expect

Hello Guys,

It's been a while since my last post as it's always a busy time of year as we move into the flat season and wait for the dust to settle as turf horses find their feet (or hoofs!) etc.

If your a subscriber to Value At The Races at the moment you'll be more than aware that we're currently suffering from a losing streak. This is nothing out of the ordinary and is common place when backing horses. This is why, when signing up we recommend a specific starting bank that will cover any of these losing streaks and still give you enough money to bet with to take advantage of the winning ones.

Now the service boasts an average of a 25% strike rate, long term. In terms of probabilty this would mean that mathematically we could expect up to 35 losers on the trot. Don't panic, although this is possible, it has never happened once in over 5 years. The most the service has ever been in the red is -£114.00 to £10 stakes. This was back in February of this year. Within 8 days of betting we were back in the black and finished the month on +£119.00 to £10 stakes.

For those that have recently joined the service, I appreciate that there is nothing worse than reading how brilliant a tipster has been and then when you join there isn't a single winner. You start to feel it's a load of b*ll*cks and wonder why you parted with your hard earnt cash?!?

I assure you that every tip I give out is part of my own betting portfolio and I back every runner with my own money. I have been a professional gambler for over 3 years now and have always recovered from losing streaks.

I hope that puts your mind's at rest and any questions please feel free to leave them below and I will try to answer them as soon as possible.

Regards,

Ed

Finding Value

Yesterday I talked you through the basics of how to understand odds and what they represent. Now that is the easy part. Implementing this into our betting is the trickier part and I'll attempt to explain this fully in today's post.

As I'm sure you're aware there are 100's of variables in horse racing and to spend time analysing every one would take about a week for one race!!

So let's keep it simple. The three variables I'll be concentrating on are Trainers strike rates, Jockeys strike rates and simple horse form.

If we head over to the racing post every morning we can click on the statistics tab above the meeting and we get a page telling us the strike rate of both trainer and jockey and their profit and loss to level stakes of £1.00

By finding a trainer with a strike rate of 20% at that specific course is a good start and if we can find a jockey with a similar strike rate riding for our trainer then we have found a possible bet.

If we remember yesterday I showed you how to work out the probability from the odds, well with trainer and jockey stats that represent a 20% strike rate we can assume that the correct price for the horse should be around the 4/1 mark.

4/1 in probability is 20% as 4 divided by 1 plus one equals 5, 100 divided by 5 equals 20%

Now if we believe that the horse has a good chance by looking at his form and the market has our horse priced up at 9/2 then we have found a value bet.

The above is not a direct route to making a profit, it is merely an example to show you how you can play around with the variables and determine what you believe to be value!

When starting a new approach, you must always play with paper money and record every bet. If you see a profit after a 100 bets then your probably onto a winner!

If you want all the hard work done for you then remember you can join my winning service over at Value At The Races today. We have shown over 60 points profit in the last 5 months and the service continues to provide winners on a regular basis.

Next time I'll be discussing my approach to Cheltenham and how I build my portfolio for the big festival.

Until then, Happy Punting,

Regards,

Ed
Value At The Races

What Is Value?

Hello and welcome to the Value At The Races' Blog.

Here you will find what I'm all about, how I make my money and general musings regarding Horse Racing and punting life.

For my first post I thought I'd give you an example of what I determine as value and how you can implement this into your betting.

The first thing to understand is how odds represent the probability of an outcome. For example, when you see the odds of 3/1 displayed from a bookie, they are suggesting that the horse in question has a 25% chance of winning that race.

To calculate this we divide the left hand number, in this case the 3, by the right hand number and add 1. This gives us 4.

We then divide 100 (there is a 100% chance a horse will win a race!) by the 4, giving us 25%

Let's do another one. 7/2 would therefore be 7 divided by 2 plus 1=4.5

100 divided by 4.5= 22.22%

So the next time you look at the odds you can now determine what the bookie is suggesting the probability of a horse winning is.

Now let's create a scenario here that we can equate to real life.

You fancy a horse that you believe has around a 25% (3/1) chance of winning its race. Imagine that 25% as a value equal to the value of a product you want to buy.

You walk into a bookies with this 25% in mind. You ask for the price of the horse and you are told it is 7/2. You know that this is 22.22%

So in reality you are able to "purchase" the horses chance at a discount!!

Imagine you wanted a new coat that cost £25.00. If you could get the exact same coat for £22.22p you would!

So the next time you fancy a horse, shop around and look for the value, in essence, the bigger the price you can get, the bigger the discount!

If you want expertly selected "Value" Tips like this the head over to Value At The Races where all the hard work is done for you.

My next post will be on how you can find your own value and start to make money from backing horses.

Until then, Happy Punting,

Regards,

Ed