Would You Like 584 Points Profit?

As a person who likes a big price win, I have learnt to pay attention to any tips provided by the best tipster in the country.  When the figures are reviewed this gentleman has an almost superhuman ability to make money.  Ben Coley writes about Golf for sportinglife.com. 

I am hoping this article will be of interest regardless of whether you enjoy the sport of Golf.  I know many people worldwide enjoy both playing and watching this sport and it’s great that they get so much pleasure from it.  I can’t watch.  I get instantly bored.  I can read a deep complicated thought piece on the state of American politics but present me with any article on Golf and I can rarely bring myself to finish it.  I literally start thinking about something else about half way down the article. 

Ben is a master at picking large prices to win and be placed.  He often ends each month with more points profit than a normal tipster makes in a year. 

The interesting thing about betting on golf is the number of places available to the enthusiastic punter.  There are a few things to be aware of as each of the bookmakers offer different place terms.  It may turn out your favoured bookmaker is not the best for golf.  I find I prefer to use my Skybet account instead of my Bet365 account for this pursuit. Ideally you want to be offered 7 to 8 places. I also think it’s not a good idea to keep battering the same bookie if one wishes to be entertained by them in the future! 

As the prices are generally very large a place can offer a great return and a win will have you dancing. 

Let's examine his record over the last 12 months: 

May-21: +169.33 

Jun-21: +116.56 

Jul-21: +156.12 

Aug-21: +11.64 

Sep-21: -36.88 

Oct-21: +46.82 

Nov-21: +28.13 

Dec-21: +64.78 

Jan-22: -5.33 

Feb-22: +107.79 

Mar-22: -91.46 

Apr-22: +16.67 

+584.17 

+584.17 is the headline figure here. This is an incredible total. In May last year he was 169.33 points up. That is crazy. At the same time as recognizing the excellence of the good months we have to take notice of the Frankenstein month in March where he lost a massive 91.46 points. If you had been backing him in the months before hand though you could have taken this punishing month on the chin. 

In my opinion a bank needs to be set aside for backing the golf. Follow all his tips at level stakes. Don’t get greedy and only raise or drop stakes at the start of a new month. Start with a small bank of money and let it build. Think about how much you would be prepared to lose on golf in a month and start with that. It can be expensive to stake out his bets so use a small unit stake. If the plan is successful this unit stake can be allowed to grow over time in order to gain more significant rewards. 

I feel it is almost a no brainer to follow this master of the betting slip. I have had some exciting times following him so far. 

I even learnt what par means. 

Decoding The Going For An Unraced 2yo

Betting on 2yo horses in a profitable manner is a tough proposition even for the most experienced horse player. The odds are stacked against getting a good percentage of winners concentrating on this age group.  Unraced 2yo’s are difficult to assess. We should look at some of the problems and the solutions we can use to gain the information required. 

We need to know if an unraced 2yo can handle the ground. We can make an educated guess by looking at a number of factors. 

The trainer has entered the horse in the race with a rough idea of what the going is likely to be at a particular racecourse when taking in to account the current weather patterns. He will have made an assessment of the horses running style and her physical make up.  If the trainer has left the animal in the race, we can assume he thinks she will get the going, but this should not be relied on.  

When we watch the horse move to the start of the race, we can assess how she moves. If her knees are coming up high and she is leaving space between the surface and her hooves when she moves there is a fair chance that she will prefer soft ground.  If the stride is more straight legged with a daisy cutting action you are watching a horse that is likely to get good ground. Check out the size of the hooves as big hooves make it easier to deal with soft ground. 

We can have a look at the horse's mother also known as the dam.  The first step is to investigate if she ever won on the going as this attribute is likely to have been inherited by her offspring, especially if the sire also won on that type of ground. It's worth checking the quality of the race she won and making sure, if possible, it was not a fluke.  

We can assess her offspring to see if any of them have been putting in good performances on the ground type.  There is a chance we can also watch them run in order to get an idea of how the 2yo we are assessing is going to look if we have not seen her before.  The most useful comparison is with brothers or sisters with the same sire. It is worth remembering though that in the same way that human brothers and sisters are likely to have different sporting prowess it is the same for the horses. Now it’s time to have a look at the sire’s progeny that have the same sire as the dam did.  There will often be a reasonably easy to identify trend towards performing well on certain surfaces. 

The next job is to examine the sire of the 2yo. We need to know if he ever won on the ground and what the quality of the races were.  This gives a really good indication of how the 2yo will run but there are even more tools at our disposal.  As the sire has more progeny than the dam there is likely to be a good deal of information available to the horse player regarding the performance of the offspring.  We can review the number of runners compared to winners % on the surface type albeit turf or dirt. We can also take a look at the wins vs runs % for further guidance.  We can also review the going stats for the sire’s progeny and see the same thing for the going type. .   

There is another horse we need to examine in much the same vein as the others we have looked at so far. This is the 2yo’s grandsire on the dam's side.  Taking a good look at this horse is really important especially if the dam was unraced as it gives an indication of the attributes the mare is likely to pass on to the 2yo. We need to look at the same information as we did for the sire regarding the surface types.  

The market can also be a guide as it is likely that a 2yo who is unsuited by the ground type will start to drift out.  It is worth remembering there could be reasons unrelated to the going type that are causing the drift especially is the horse is sweating up going down to the start or there is a tv hot pot in the race.  Very few people actually have an idea of the horse's attributes at this stage apart from the connections. 

Getting Value From Doubles, Trebles & Accumulators

In today’s blog I am going to talk about unpermed win doubles, trebles and accumulators. The focus will be on horse racing. 

Multiples are a naturally tempting prospect for the enthusiastic horse player. Small stakes can offer large returns. Many people dream of one day hitting the big one.  

My first manager at Ladbrokes was an incredibly shrewd individual. I questioned him about the matter one sunny afternoon in the early noughties. His opinion was that most of this type of bet were to the bookies benefit and that he would happily sit and take them all day. Sitting that side of the counter it was easy to see that most people’s plays were either too ambitious or fundamentally flawed in some regard. The people who won multiples tended to use doubles and trebles. It was rare to pay a 4-fold plus. 

Let’s do some maths! I promise I will do all the hard work and that I will explain everything fully so please don’t be alarmed. 

We will look at the combined odds of a few different bets all of which will have selections placed at 1/1. 

Double £1 @ 1/1 x 1/1 = £4 = 3/1 

Treble £1 @ 1/1 x 1/1 x 1/1 = £8 = 7/1 

4-fold £1 @ 1/1 x 1/1 x 1/1 x 1/1 = £16 = 15/1 

We can see the double looks easy but two horses have to win for little reward. By backing the 4–fold we can get 15/1 but is that really enough of a reward for picking 4 horses? The answer is subjective to both your opinion and the relative merits of the horses concerned. 

One of the most common losers I used to see was the following type of bet. The customer had usually selected three short ones and added a longshot. This is usually the betting equivalent of buying an ice cream in a cone on a hot day and slamming it in to your own forehead. 

4-Fold £1 @ 6/4 x 1/1 x 2/1 x 8/1 = £135 = 134/1 

The experienced betting enthusiast will see I am obviously painting in broad strokes so could we make this pay? 

The first step is to immediately lose a selection. By its very nature a 4-fold increases the risk factor and we want an achievable bet. I would normally suggest losing the biggest liability - the 8/1 horse. After reviewing the selections, we decide the 8/1 shot is massively overpriced and should be somewhere around 4/1 at the most. We decide to drop the 2/1 as we are not sure if he will get the trip. 

We now have:  

Treble £1 @ 6/4 x 1/1 x 8/1 = £45 = 44/1 

44/1 still looks hard to achieve but the odds would suggest it’s just about possible. If our view on the overpriced 8/1 shot is correct the chances of achieving the bet change as I will now show you: 

Treble @ 6/4 x 1/1 x 4/1 = 24/1 

We would hope to get this bet up at least once in 25 attempts so the reward of £44 begins to look quite tasty. It’s certainly a better return than the £15 we would have received had we dropped the 8/1 and kept the 2/1. 

I hope I have given the reader some food for thought and I will be talking about this subject as well as many others in future blogs. 

The Evolution Of Betting At Chester

I have always looked forward to the big Chester meeting after the Guineas weekend ever since I first stared in wonder at the betting shop screen and asked my boss if Chester had a straight. Over the years I have had a lot of fun punting at this course. Even at the turn of the century it was generally easy to end up in profit or at least not badly off after this meeting. The key was always to pick your favourite horse from the lowest 5 post position’s and making sure that he would get out well. The only people down in the mouth were the bookies and the badly drawn jockeys and trainers.  

In those days we didn’t have access to the kind of information regarding the draw as we have today yet I feel the public used to make more money from the meeting. Draw bias information was scarce unless you purchased a massive book with the previous year’s results in. We combined the information from the book with carefully recorded handwritten stats regarding the recent season and visual analysis on the day. It was difficult to research and generally punters relied on “the word on the street”. At one point I remember the Racing Post had some elementary data but it was not very useful.  

Things have come a long way since then and we can access up to 10 years' worth of stats on any British course with a few mouse clicks. Not only that but we can view how different race conditions change the chances. 

The punters are by no means the only people to take notice of this information. The bookmakers raised a cynical eyebrow and shortened the prices on the horses they liked in the first 4 and extended the prices of the horses that in their eyes failed to make the grade. This allowed them to protect their liabilities on the better horses and to entice people to bet on the boosted price horses that had a smaller chance.  

The trainers and jockeys have also taken notice and whereas before they may have decided to run a horse in its normal fashion nowadays, they are quite happy to modify the horse's style to give them a chance with an impossible draw. This can sometimes create a false pace in the race. 

The draw is incredibly significant at this course. The course is almost constantly turning to the left with what I have heard described as a cricket pitch for the straight. Most of the time you want to concentrate on draws 1 to 4. With unraced horses or inexperienced 2yo’s a horse can actually benefit from a wider draw as long as it's not too high as it allows them to see through the turn which makes them more confident as they have a better idea of what is going on and are unlikely to get caught up in any crunch points. It is important the horse has a good record of getting away well from the stalls here otherwise there will be no benefit to the good post position. 

How To Make A Book To Determine Value

Back in the early 2000’s when I was learning how to be a bookmaker working for Ladbrokes the company trained me to make a basic book. 

In this case we are not talking about some kind of red covered tome with many pages titled The Big Red Sign.  A book is the set of odds for any given race.

People have been gambling for thousands of years and there has always been a person willing to lay the bets (citation needed)! I imagine many methods were used over the years but the method I am about to show you is the concept the bookies use to price up a race. I imagine that before we had the highly numerate society we have today there must have been some great value on offer along with some really restrictive prices.  Mistakes in calculations were likely to have been common.  Nowadays of course this is all done by computer with algorithms.  

In order to make the book for a race the bookie has to consider many things.  The easiest way to describe this is that the bookie has to handicap the race in order to get the projected finishing positions. The finishing positions are determined by working out the percentage chance each horse has of winning in the field that he is running in.

We were taught to make a list of horses and to put a row of categories at the top.  The categories related to aspects such as the form, trainer, jockey, going etc. In real life a bookie would use many more categories.   As this was a training exercise we then marked each horse in the most basic of fashions by putting a tick in each category that we thought the runner was strong in.  If he liked the ground he got a tick.  If the trainer was doing poorly he would get a cross. We will use awesome horses for this example because we can.

In this example I have used a P instead of a tick for technical reasons to do with squarespace that are far too boring to explain. 

Newmarket (Rowley mile) 1m Equinetipster Stakes Group 1 (3yo+) £450,000

Name	Jockey	Trainer	Form	Going	Draw
Coroebus	P	P	P	P	P
Baaeed	P	P	P	x	x
Palace Pier	x	x	P	P	P
Secretariat	x	x	P	x	x

 In this example Coroebus gets a score of 5, Baaeed and Palace Pier score 3 and Secretariat scores 1

The total score achieved by the runners is 12.

We need to work out the percentage chance of each horse winning the race as the scores are only the first part of the process.

We will use the following calculation: (runner score divided by total runner score) multiplied by 100.

First we will divide Coroebus’s score of 5 by 12 then multiply by 100 = 41.67%

Next we do the same type of calculation for Baaeed which in this case has the same score as Palace Pier. 3 divided by 12 multiplied by 100 =25%

We could be lazy now and add the three percentages together and subtract them from 100%. I see this as very bad practice if you are not using a spreadsheet as by calculating the last horses percentage we can check no mistakes have been made by adding all the horses percentages together to = 100%

Secretariat has a score of 1. 1 divided by 12 multiplied by 100 = 8.33%

By adding our totals together we have 100%

41.67+25+25+8.33 = 100%

So what odds are the horses?

We can look at a standard percentage/odds conversion chart to see. https://bitodds.com/odds-conversion-table-with-probability/

Coroebus = 41.67% = 7/5 (2.4)

Baaeed = 25% = 3/1 (4)

Palace Pier = 25% = 3/1 (4)

Secretariat = 8.33 = 11/1 (12)

This is our basic book.  At this point the book would not be in the bookies favour or the horse players.  By backing every horse, the horse player cannot make profit. By laying every horse the bookie will not make profit.

Here we have to introduce the concept of under round and over round. For a bookie to make profit the combined odds have to come to more than 100% this is called an over round and is the bookies projected profit margin on a race. If the combined odds were less than 100% this is an under round. 

For this example we have decided we want 16 % profit. We have decided to go for a balanced book and allocate the 16% evenly awarding each horse an extra 4%

The revised book looks like this

Coroebus = 45.67% = 6/5 (2.19)

Baaeed = 29% = 5/2 (3.5)

Palace Pier = 29% = 5/2 (3.5)

Secretariat = 12.33% = 7/1 (8) Actually the decimal would come to 8.11 but we’ll leave that for the exchanges and a different blog.

If you wish you can make a simple spreadsheet at home on excel.  You can approximate the odds each runner should be based upon the factors you think are important. Don’t forget to build in the bookies margin!

This allows the horse player to establish whether a horse is good or bad value.  No doubt when you look at a race you will have strong opinions and this will help you decide whether to back a horse and to what extent.  If you work out the horse is better value than it should be, consider why that may be.  The same applies if there seems to be too much value. If value is said to be in the eye of the beholder the truth of the matter could be said to be in the spreadsheet of the mathematician, but of course, that does not roll off the tongue as well.

Understanding odds is important to the success of any horse player.  It is not just about if the horse can win it is also about the value the horse will provide.  On that note it’s worth reading my previous blog if you have not experienced it yet.

Making a book is a fun exercise.  Why not give it a go and discover the value for yourself