Every year on ANZAC Day I look forward to listening to the dawn service from Martin Place on the radio. This dawn service is on the television, of course, on almost all networks, but I find there is something very special about listening to the service rather than seeing it.
My preference is to listen in a dark room, maybe even in bed with no light whatsoever. The service becomes more intimate in this way and allows a mental image to be drawn of a quiet, humble service by candlelight occurring just as the sun starts to make its light known. More importantly it allows me to imagine what our servicemen and servicewomen endure in dark and hostile locations around the world, and specifically given it is ANZAC Day and the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli in World War I, how our soldiers in that time must have felt, in the dark, on the other side of the world, with their only link to the rest of the world being a radio if they were lucky and an occasional letter service at other times.
I made the mistake one year of turning on the television for the Martin Place dawn service and was aghast at the entire area being floodlit. I know light is important for television, but it ruins the atmosphere of a very important and solemn event in my view.
The marches during the day require light and a generally happy atmosphere of gratitude, but this is not the case for the dawn services which occur in the dark as a commemoration of the events of the fateful landing at Gallipoli at dawn on April 25, 1915, and deserve a solemn atmosphere which dark and candlelight provide, and floodlights do not.
With a 57% strike rate this is a decent strategy, but this is not a “set and forget” system. In order to be profitable it does require a few minutes of management each day.
This is using the Stop At A Winner Greyhound Deluxe software to dutch bet (proportionate bet sizes per runner to receive the same amount of profit regardless of which one of them wins) the top two favourites in the market. In my testing over the course of two weeks, it has generally returned a daily profit of about 100x whatever the per-winning-race profit target is set to.
There have been some drawdowns and stop losses hit along the way, which is why a bit of daily management is required to keep it on track. I explain the details of how to do this in the video, along with a second way of managing it which returns a lower profit but also carries a lower risk of hitting a stop loss and so potentially could be a better way to manage the system in the long run.
Somewhere around 2006 to 2008, a new and bizarre twist on the gameshow format took over the wee small hours of television both in Australia and the UK, maybe elsewhere too. It was a live-to-air interactive gameshow which tried to get viewers to call in to answer extremely simple questions for a chance to win cash prizes. The catch was that these shows were really there to make money for the networks by requiring viewers to ring premium rate phone numbers for a chance to get through, and most of the time the callers did not get through but were instead put on a callback list, and eventually when a producer decided enough money had been made, one of those callers would be called back at random…in the middle of the night, when the majority of the target audience was inebriated or crazy.
In between calls it was the host’s job, with some support from the crew, to fill time with whatever their imagination could dream up. Many many hours of filling airtime while the hosts slowly went as crazy as some of the callers.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well…one of the hosts of the British version of Quizmania, Greg Scott, was the subject of more than a few peculiar live-to-air moments and managed to roll with most of them very well indeed. This has been one of my favourite video clips on the internet for many years. My favourite moment is the caller who seems to have called the wrong channel with an answer to a question on a competing show on another network.
Eventually these shows died off almost entirely, although there was a studio in the Czech Republic churning out dozens of versions this type of show for various countries only a few years ago. As free-to-air TV viewership dwindles, it’s hard to see how this type of thing would make enough money to pay the bills these days. It was a strange form of fun while it lasted.
Thank you to all of you for your patience during my recent absence. I would like to especially thank those of you who offered your kind wishes to my mother while she was in hospital. Mum is back at home now, happy and comfortable, but still requires surgery at a date in the future which is yet to be set.
Today I have for you a rather simple little strategy which works quite slowly but also quite steadily on the horse racing markets. This is looking at the place market and looking to lay the favourite if it is at odds of 1.60 to 1.99. This generally indicates that although it is the favourite, it is quite a weak favourite, and often this results in it not running a place. Most favourites tend to sit at 1.50 or lower on the place market so this strategy doesn’t get a lot of bets but it does tend to get a good percentage of successful bets.
I am running this on races globally, wherever Betfair offers a place market. This is generally every horse and harness race in Australia and New Zealand, just about every race in the UK and Ireland, and then some of the French, South African and American races. The settings are fairly straight forward.
(click image to enlarge)
On these settings I would recommend a balance of $200 as a starting point (and yes, I know my balance is less than that in the screenshot, but I had some unexpected expenses recently and withdrawing some funds from Betfair was the best option at the time, and it does mean I’m running a bit of a risk having less than an ideal amount of funds to work with for this strategy but it has been steady over the month that it has been running so I’m willing to take that risk at this point in time).
These graphs show you results over the last month of testing, running a Stop At A Winner Staking method. You can see it has made approximately $80 in the month. Not a huge amount, but it has done so in a fairly steady manner with only two brief drawdowns of note.
It’s worth noting that the place market doesn’t have a heap of liquidity and not every race globally has a place market, and the number of races with a favourite in the target range is a fairly small percentage of events. But it is being selective in this manner which allows the system to flourish. Keeping the odds under 2.00 also means the stop at a winner staking method escalates in bet size quite slowly, which also helps to maintain it as a fairly safe and steady system. And the Stop At A Winner Deluxe software handles the job quite nicely.
Those of you who are reading this and thinking it has been a bit quiet here of late would be correct. Alas over the last couple of weeks I have been working a roster which is not my usual roster and has taken a bit of a toll on my sleep, which has made it difficult to find time to write much. And now I have a close family member in hospital awaiting an operation so I remain distracted.
Hopefully everything will settle down soon and I will be able to write more soon. I have run out of pre-written Sunday Share posts too, so I will need to put something together there before the end of the week.
There are many more peculiarly translated songs that I could share with you, but I’m going to end the series of translated songs today, at least for a while, with this one which is my favourite of all of the translations. A translation of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
I hope that you have enjoyed this and been very happy about these fabrics. A change of pace is upon us next week for The Sunday Share.
