Introducing Hard ‘N’ Soft Staking – a staking plan I designed to turbocharge your profits during winning runs and protect your bankroll in losing runs.
I’m very pleased to have been able to collaborate with Steve and Michael to take my idea for the staking plan, which I was calculating manually, and transform it into a highly usable and attractive staking plan available as both a cloud version and an Excel version at https://hardnsoftstaking.com
In this video I cover What Hard ’N’ Soft Staking is, show it in action in both good periods and bad periods, demonstrating its ability to make profit under various conditions while protecting your bank balance along the way. In the next video I intend to go into a more detailed explanation of the inner workings of the staking plan and some of the thought process behind it.
I hope you enjoy this and it brings you an extra edge in your betting.
Well, thank you for your patience in waiting for this one. I had hoped to have this video ready for you a couple weeks ago but my mother went back into hospital on Christmas Day which threw quite the spanner in the works. Thankfully Mum is back home and recovering well, having finally had the operation she originally went to the hospital for back in April.
In today’s video, an update on the AI stats powered soccer strategy I demonstrated a couple months ago, now with updated settings to improve performance. Also two new strategies which are both showing good results, also using the AI-powered stats and predictions of SPM Bot.
Samuel provides an update and revision on an ANZ Bot strategy to use stats to find winners and turn a profit on Australia and New Zealand horse racing, getting the ANZ Bot to find runners which have a good performance rating and a good jockey/trainer combo, but a poor Sky rating.
Samuel also explains why the revisions were made and a tip on filtering the Sky ratings in the ANZ Bot for better results.
Clive Robertson didn’t play a lot of music on his overnight show on 2UE, but there were a few songs which he would play more often than others. Many of these were quite sad and poignant songs, but one in particular was a very upbeat tune which seemed to have a message about the news and world events which mirrored Clive’s own observations. Something particularly notable about this song is it was released many years after one would have expected Clive to pay all that much attention to new music, and yet it clearly was a song of which he was quite fond.
The 1997 hit for Propellerheads, featuring vocals by Shirley Bassey, History Repeating
Clive took quite an interest in how things work, and I recall him once noting a couple videos available on YouTube about the workings of The Talking Clock. Hence, I’m sure he would have found this video about the making of the video clip of History Repeating to be quite interesting.
The rather sad news came through yesterday that broadcaster Clive Robertson had died at the age of 78 after a battle with cancer.
People who have been around this blog for a very very long time would be aware of my fondness and appreciation for Clive’s broadcasts. He was of course well known for his television work on Newsworld and similar shows, however I am most fond of his radio work. The period of time he spent in 2007 and 2008 hosting 2UE’s New Day Australia program is a particularly cherished memory as I often worked overnight during this period in a job which often had a distinct lack of work needing to be done during the overnight hours, interspersed with moments of frantic activity, and listening to Clive made the night much more enjoyable.
Clive had the incredible ability to just talk…about anything really, and be interesting, entertaining, funny, informative, and follow a stream of consciousness without losing sight of the original subject, and do this for hour after hour after hour without it ever getting old. Clive was perfectly capable of taking a routine weather report and detouring into a raft of stories while still providing a weather forecast and taking up most of the hour doing it.
Clive was equally able to converse with any caller about pretty much any subject and make it riveting radio for the listeners. Well, almost any caller. There was that woman whose name escapes me who would usually call in around 4am to have a very loud rant about Zion and Israel. She would always start off quietly and escalate into a full-on rant and rave at a level short of yelling, and then abruptly, sometimes mid-sentence, exclaim “thank you!” and slam the phone down. Clive tried to converse with her one night but it was not possible to interrupt her.
And then there was the time he took an inebriated lady’s call who had been on hold waiting to speak to Stuart Bocking on the show preceding Clive’s. She wanted to speak to “Stuart Bottles” and seemed rather put out to have been answered by “Dr. Cliff”. Clive seemed quite chuffed at his newfound doctorate.
I chatted with Clive about many things, including some of my peculiar dreams. Clive seemed to be entertained by them, but was disappointed to appear in my dreams considering I am male and he preferred to appear in the dreams of females. He cooked rice in the microwave of my kitchen while Bruce McAvaney and Dennis Cometti commentated in one dream, and somewhat crankily drove a bus in another. Clive also thought this website was very strange and I should see a physician about it. I was most entertained when Clive, aficionado of all things trains, took the time to explain why my dream about carriages of a City Rail train disconnecting from each other and then later reconnecting was impossible.
Here is the audio of Clive explaining to me the issues with the train dream, among other issues I apparently have.
Always great fun talking to Clive.
Clive also, one night, after a conversation with me about something-or-other probably quite mundane as usual, played Huey Lewis & The News’ Hip To Be Square in my honour.
Clive came and went from radio a number of times. One of his more recent outings on the airwaves was alongside Mike Jeffreys at 2UE. Those two make a fantastic duo and it was great radio. I had hoped that in Mike’s current role at 2GB, Clive might make a cameo appearance but alas it wasn’t to be.
A genuinely nice, interesting and gentle man, misunderstood by many, cherished by many more. Vale Clive.
It has been many years since I’ve been able to greet you from Deniliquin.
Long-time readers would remember that I spent some time working at 1521 2QN in 2008 and 2009 and often posted stories about things happening in Deni and sometimes stories of my time at 2QN as well.
Well, it’s 2QN which brings me back to town again. Not to work, but rather because the station is 90 years old this year. Local historian Ian Lea has written a book about the history of 2QN and a launch is being held for the book at 2QN’s studios tomorrow afternoon, followed by an afternoon tea and a tour of the studios. It will be interesting to see if ACE Radio have painted the studios since I worked there…it was painted once in my time there.
The weather forecast looked acceptable so I decided to take the bike. It was very warm for most of the trip and I was practically melting when I got to the takeaway in Urana, but all of this changed closer to Jerilderie where a little bit of rain appeared. After Jerilderie a storm front approached and I encountered very strong crosswinds which made riding quite challenging, and then the rain. The heaviest of the rain was south of me but it was heavy enough anyway. I actually found the rain had got in and made my indicators somewhat erratic when I got to Deni. This was all sorted once I stopped undercover briefly at the motel to check in. Just enough time to dry out I suppose.
It was an enjoyable ride anyway, despite the end of the ride being more challenging than I expected.
In today’s video I have a look at the poor strike rate of the top pick in Sky Racing’s rating system, and how the ANZ Bot can be set to profitably lay these selections by using the ANZ Ratings.
Given Nice Mr. Donald’s victory this week (I’ll analyse my prediction tomorrow now that it looks like the final states have been decided at last) I thought I’d go back to 2016 and something quite perplexing at the time.
Hugh Hewitt for those of you who don’t know (and I wouldn’t blame you at all for not knowing) is possibly the most boring presenter in all of talk radio…actually no I take that back, there’s a bloke who used to fill in for someone who was much more boring but I can’t remember his name. Hugh is actually quite a nice person, it’s just that he puts together a complete snorefest of a show across the Salem Radio Network.
Hugh worked in the Reagan administration and found his way into talk radio at some stage after that. He is a perplexing character in some ways as he seems to personally be a quite conservative person but suffers from the same affliction as many traditional Republican politicians in that he advocates for conservative ideals until he hits any resistance from the other side and then wants to compromise. This is largely what led to Republican voters embracing Trump in 2016 as he advocated for a lot of their positions and didn’t seem to care about backlash.
Anyway, like most traditional Republicans in 2016, Hugh wasn’t much of a fan of Donald Trump. Every day after Trump secured the nomination it seemed that Hugh changed his mind on whether to support him or not. I considered him to be a good barometer on the support Trump could expect from rusted-on Republican voters as they always had the option to just not vote. Eventually Hugh got behind Trump finally and permanently based on Trump’s list of people he would consider appointing to the Supreme Court as Hugh recognised the Supreme Court and the many Federal Court positions Trump would fill would be of great benefit for conservative politicians for decades to come even if the achieved absolutely nothing else in office.
After Trump won the election and prior to him taking office, Hugh started playing a song every single day as a message to Trump. For a very very boring show, it was extremely surprising, not only because Hugh’s enthusiasm for the song was out of step with the general tenor of his show, but because the song isn’t one you’d expect to find anywhere on the AM dial under any circumstances.
Hugh’s advice to Trump from the song was the “drive it [the presidency] like you stole it”. In other words, just go at getting as much done as possible because you only have a very limited amount of time to do it. While, in 2024, given what happened in 2020, we probably don’t want to offer a president-elect advice about treating the presidency as if it was stolen, I expect Hugh’s sentiment is the same today as it was back then, and Trump’s sentiment certainly appears to be that way. It should be noted Hugh was very pleased by Trump’s efforts to get things done in his first terms and how he seemed to get a lot more done than most Republicans do, so Hugh is firmly behind Trump this time around without any hesitation.
Back to the song. It’s a catchy tune and one worth sharing. I was certainly reminded of it this week.
It’s election day in the US, or what I hope will be a very happy Orange Man Day!
To that end, my Electoral College prediction map (created via Real Clear Politics’ map generator) and I have decided to change the Republican red to Trump Orange.
I’m hoping that tomorrow’s predicted showers in Canberra jump forward just a tad into this evening. Back in 2016, Donald Trump gave his speech at around 7:30pm (about 3:30am in New York) and as soon as he finished, Canberra’s sky turned orange and it started to rain. It’s said that a shower is a sign of a blessing so I took it as a sign that the orange man was a blessing on the world. One certainly hopes for a great bigly orange blessing for the world today!
It’s always a tough race to pick, and it was a fantastic run and ride by Knight’s Choice and jockey Robbie Dolan to get there. I’m pleased that the horse I said couldn’t win based on my settings in the ANZ Analyser, the well-fancied Buckaroo didn’t win. The lay bet there made up a bit of the mess that was the rest of my tips…although it has to be said Zardozi was looking good about 300m out.
1st: Knight’s Choice. Some extraordinary prices too. Betfair SP: $268.01 | VOP: $91 | Tote: $63.50
2nd: Warp Speed
3rd: Okita Sushi
4th: Zardozi – my outsider tip
5th: Absurde
6th: Circle Of Fire
7th: Fancy Man
8th: Land Legend
9th: Buckaroo – the one I said couldn’t win
10th: Kovalica
11th: Vauban – my 2nd selection
12th: Onesmoothoperator – my top tip
13th: Valiant King
14th: Sea King
15th: Interpretation
16th: Sharp N Smart
17th: Trust In You
18th: Mostly Cloudy
19th: Manzoice
20th: Positivity
21st: The Map – didn’t meet Analyser backing criteria
22nd: Saint George
23rd: Just Fine
I’ve put together my tips and some race broadcast information for you in this video, and a summary below.
My top tip is 13. Onesmoothoperator. Having won the Geelong Cup very nicely at the last start and being in good form, I like the chances of this horse very much. The distance does concern me a bit, being 800m longer than the Geelong Cup, but the 3200m distance of the Melbourne Cup is a bit of a question mark for every runner so I’m not too worried about it.
I also like 1. Vauban which is a proven quality horse, but is carrying an awful lot of weight this time around so I fancy this one to run a place but would be surprised if it wins, and 14. Zardozi is my outside chance as a strong performer over long distances, but it has been well over 200 days since the last win so it’s not a certainty by any means.
My favourite ANZ Analyser system didn’t quite find anything to back which is hardly surprising in such a large field with such wildly different forms. The closest it came to making a selection was 23. The Map which met the criteria for the jockey/trainer combination being very good and is not liked by Sky Racing’s ratings which is good sign, but fell a fair bit short on form ratings.
The ANZ Analyser did pick a horse to lay. 2. Buckaroo which is the top of the Sky Racing ratings. It’s a lay as long as it is paying $4 or more. Currently it’s at $7 so it meets the lay criteria.
Broadcast details
TV and streaming
Another year, another change in broadcast rights. TAB Corp bought the master rights this time around in an effort to limit the amount of advertising their gambling rivals could air during the telecast. The deal makes Sky Racing the host broadcaster and the world feed producer, but also required them to involve one of the major free to air networks.
Nine is the primary free to air broadcaster this year and for the next few years. Note that Seven is running Sydney races and it would be easy enough to accidentally tune into their horse racing coverage and miss the race, so be sure not to tune in to Seven for the Cup by mistake. Of course Nine, as the main free to air broadcaster, is a bit more interested in the fashions than the sport, so if you want more analysis of the racing you might want to look elsewhere.
Sky Racing has coverage on Sky 1. This is available on Foxtel, Kayo, the TAB website and app, the apps of most of the corporate bookmakers, and on the screens of just about every pub and club in the country.
Racing.com, the channel owned by Racing Victoria has been granted limited broadcast rights. They are allowed to air the race on their free to air channel (68 or 78 depending on your location) as it is a relatively low bitrate SD service, and via their website in HD. They have to black out the race on their Foxtel, Kayo and 7plus services however as these are seen as being in direct competition with Sky and Nine’s services.
International broadcasts (the race is at 4am UTC):
The racing.com stream (requires free registration) might work overseas in some locations
New Zealand: Trackside 1 (5pm NZ time)
UK: Sky Sports Racing (4am UK time)
USA: FanDuel TV (11pm ET)
An interesting thing about FanDuel TV is that in addition to a TV channel it has a stream which seems to not be geoblocked. So this is probably an option globally.
Radio
If you can’t get to a screen but still want to follow the race, the radio is a good option.
The National Racing Service comprising Sky Sports Radio, RSN, RadioTAB and TABradio has stations in just about every town in the country. You can find your local frequency via the Sky website for most of the country or for Western Australia on the TABradio website. These can also be streamed in Australia and overseas via those websites.
Nine Radio is taking the official call with Matt Hill on 2GB Sydney, 3AW Melbourne, 4BC Brisbane and 6PR Perth. Nine is also the syndication partner for the official call and is providing it to dozens of commercial stations across the country, so there’s probably at least one where you are.
SEN has its own coverage with a call by Gerard Whateley on almost all of the SEN and SEN Track stations. A list of stations can be found here. They can also be streamed via their website and app.
And ABC Radio has coverage on many ABC Local Radio stations, plus ABC Sport on DAB+, the ABC website and the ABC Listen app.
Ultimately, if you scan the dial shortly before the race you’ll almost certainly find at least one or two stations covering the race.
It is a wonderful day on the Australian sporting calendar. I wish you every success with it!
In this video I shares my scepticism around many of the AI claims advertised all over the place, and show how the AI predictions in Soccer Price Monitor have proved me wrong, delivering ongoing profits on soccer markets around the clock.
Plus some soccer vision which won’t get the video taken down, and a look ahead to Melbourne Cup day.
The ACT had an election yesterday. My thoughts on it actually date back to the 2020 election which saw some very strange swings towards the incumbent Labor government and their friends the Greens, especially in electorates where such a thing probably shouldn’t have happened (Brindabella in southern Canberra which is the only part of town which consistently leans towards the Liberal Party, and Murrumbidgee in the west which picked up a couple Liberal-friendly suburbs in a redistribution and yet had quite a swing against the Liberals). These swings could only really be attributed to the incumbency bounce which occurred in many elections in 2020 due to COVID.
This election has mostly seen those swings reverse. Labor and the Greens have fallen back a touch which due to the peculiarities of the Hare-Clark system means the Greens have lost about half their seats. The Liberals recovered largely in Brindabella and Murrumbidgee but fell overall due to various independents doing quite well and probably picking up two seats. The Liberal vote also suffered overall as leader Elizabeth Lee, battling with three other party leaders in Kurrajong, didn’t pick up a quota on her own which is unusual for a leader in an ACT election.
The upshot of it all though is that, for all of the excitement about some independents getting in, Labor and Greens combined still have a majority so it’s likely that their governing coalition will continue unabated. As usual, as I have observed in every ACT election since 2012, people have expressed a desire for change but not actually voted in a way which delivered any change. Even if there had been a real change from this election, I doubt it would be smooth sailing. So much change is required that I’m sure many things would slip through the cracks, create controversy and derail the new government eventually.
Ultimately, being a voter with a conservative viewpoint in the ACT is a wasted effort. Not just in territory elections but in federal ones too. My electorate in the middle of Canberra is such a safe Labor seat that it barely even attracts candidates outside the major parties, and when it does it’s usually someone further left than the Greens. Even the Senate seems to be a lost cause now.
I could worry about it, but I realised a while ago that even when I do get some politicians elected whom I happen to support, they usually do something to disappoint me or fail to live up to the ideals I thought they would represent. One, who is no longer in parliament, even cemented my decision to get out of party membership entirely by boldly lying to me about a very shabby internal party matter (which I happened to know quite a lot about, maybe more than this person thought I knew) while trying to get me to vote a certain way in an internal party election.
So ultimately I now just accept that government and party politics is broken, especially while we have electoral systems which claim to be democratic but put people in parliament that in almost every case were not the preferred candidate of the majority of their electorate. It’s a farce, and it’s fair to say I am thoroughly disillusioned with the whole thing. For the record I did cast a formal vote, but it’s beyond me why I bothered. If only ballot papers had a “none of the above” option and people who received fewer votes than it were ineligible for election.
Which leads me to the song. The line from the song which comes to mind is “I used to care but things have changed”. Ironically, this song was used for a Canberra tourism commercial at one stage.
Good song. As cynical as I have become.
By the way, I misspelled “independents” and “indepents” earlier today. Autocorrect wanted to change it to “ineptness”. Changing the party name Independents For Canberra to Ineptness For Canberra sounds like a perfect description of the ACT Government. Another four years of ineptness, hooray! I think I’ll just look away…
I came across an unusual problem about a week ago which has probably been an issue on this particular computer for a long time without me realising it as I have one other application on there which uses a large amount of memory if left open for a long time, so I have a routine to restart that application once every couple of weeks.
Unfortunately such a thing isn’t really possible with an antivirus program without restarting the computer, and this particular system needs to stay running as much as possible. Restarting it is something which I can only really schedule in a couple brief windows each week without causing other issues.
This particular system is running Windows 7 so it is well and truly out of date in terms of Windows support, and Eset doesn’t release new software versions for it but does continue to provide antivirus definitions for it. Updating it to Windows 10 or Windows 11 isn’t really an option due to some of the software running on it being antiquated. One piece of software in particular has been discontinued and replaced by a different product which doesn’t quite work the same way and isn’t suitable for my purposes any more. I don’t know if installing and activating the old software on a new system would even be workable and the last time I had an interaction with support for that software, it left me less than certain that they knew much about how it worked at all. So I’m left needing to continue to run a Windows 7 system. While this does present some security risks, if properly managed these can be largely mitigated.
So, back to the problem I started to encounter with Eset Antivirus.
The other week I was investigating some performance issues with the machine and noticed one component of Eset was using over 900MB of RAM. This was unusual as it has never really left double digits before in my observations. The process in question was eguiProxy.exe. This process acts as a bridge between the Eset program window and the backend processes, allowing the Eset window to get and display information about the Eset Antivirus status and allow the user to start scans etc without needing administrative privileges. The eguiProxy.exe process is supposed to close shortly after the Eset window is closed, but a bug in some version 16 installations causes eguiProxy.exe to not close (and in some cases to run even if the Eset window was never opened) and to instead just sit there and eat up RAM indefinitely. Sometimes it will close after a few days, while on other occasions it just sits there until it is using up as much memory as the system will allow and starting to cause issues for other processes.
Memory usage after a few days of uptime
I had to restart this machine at a not-at-all optimal time to clear the excess memory usage and allow the rest of the system’s software to function normally, and due to the timing of this also had to manually fix a handful of processes which were interrupted or failed.
I was running Eset Antivirus 16.0.26.0
Eset released an update to version 16.0.28.0 to solve this issue, however in most cases the Eset application does not automatically update to this version and instead requires a manual update. As you can see in the above screenshot, Eset thinks it is up to date despite being on version 16.0.26.0 and not 16.0.28.0.
Hopefully the file remains in that location, however Eset’s websites have a habit of pages moving around quite a lot, so I have decided to mirror the file myself. It can be downloaded here. As it is a signed file, you can verify its authenticity by whether Windows accepts the signing to be valid. Regardless, if you can find the file on Eset’s websites, it is better to get it from there than from a random website on the internet such as mine, but I provide the download just in case you can’t find it elsewhere.
What isn’t clearly explained on the Eset website and doesn’t become apparent until you try to install it is that to install it, the system must be running at least Windows 7 SP1 with two specific updates installed, KB4474419 and KB4490628. If you try to install the Eset update without those Windows updates, it will refuse to install and send you to a series of Eset pages which provide a mishmash of information about whether or not you can install the Eset update.
As Microsoft stopped providing updates for Windows 7 some time ago, I disabled the Windows Update service (you can do that in Windows 7 – it’s a pain in Windows 10 and later, but I documented a method for doing so a few months ago) as I found it was often using excessive CPU to check for updates which were never coming. In order to install those updates, the Windows Update service must be enabled, so I had to re-enable it temporarily.
It turned out I already had SP1 and KB4474419 installed, and just had to install KB4490628. Once I did that, Eset version 16.0.28.0 was happy to install. The installer requests a login to Eset Home but this is not necessary. If Eset Antivirus is already activated, once installed the new version will recognise that, but if it isn’t activated you can always active or login after installation.
So now I have version 16.0.28.0 installed
And pleasingly the eguiProxy.exe process now only opens if the Eset window is opened, and closes shortly after the window is closed, no longer draining memory until Windows is left exasperated at the diminished resource.
