As you may have noticed, I’ve been absent for a little while. A large chunk of that time was due to hayfever really hitting hard this year. Unfortunately most medications do absolutely nothing for me and I pretty much ran out of the only one which does work for me while I waited for more to arrive from the US. I’ll tell you more about that later.
For now though, I have some ideas to share with you which are proving profitable for betting on harness racing. I also demonstrate how I have used the ANZ Ratings and Analyser to work out some ideas, and how I have implemented them in the ANZ Bot.
The place market for greyhounds is notoriously difficult to make money from, with low prices and limited liquidity, but with some careful selection criteria to ensure enough market liquidity and carefully keeping bet size within a reasonably narrow window, a profit can be made.
In this video I show you some settings in SAW Greyhounds Deluxe to turn a profit in the place market. It’s not huge money, but every little bit helps.
Today I demonstrate how my ANZ Ratings, Analyser & Bot strategies have found big winners in recent days on Australian and New Zealand horse races, and I show how to implement these and other strategies in the ANZ Bot to run on autopilot. Plus updates on previously demonstrated strategies, and a trick to get the bot to look at only harness races if you have a strategy specifically for harness races.
Today I’m looking at the football correct score market and how the Real Money Staking system has been profitable throughout the Euro 2024 tournament, and how Easy Bet Bot Deluxe simplifies placing the bets. Plus a look at how some other sports would work with this staking plan.
As a follow-up to last week’s video on Shorties Staking with horse racing and greyhound racing, today I explains how I have been using Shorties Staking on the tennis during the Wimbledon tournament. Plus a Quick Look at a free website and app I use to keep track of various sporting events.
Today I’m looking at how the Shorties Staking plan can be used to make the most of short-priced runners, with a particular focus on the favourite in the place market of British horse and greyhound races, although the system can be used on a much wider variety of sports and markets. While this is primarily a manual betting staking plan, I also look at ways to use automation to assist with it.
It has been quite remarkable to watch the ongoing saga of the betting scandal surrounding (almost certainly) outgoing British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, which has provided almost the only interesting spectacle in an otherwise quite dull election campaign, with the only other interesting facet being Nigel Farage entering the fray as leader of Reform UK (previously known as the Brexit Party) and managing to get ahead of the Conservatives in a number of polls, although whether this translates to more seats is yet to be seen.
For those of you who aren’t aware, the scandal relates to bets placed on the date on which the UK election would be held. Shortly after Rishi Sunak surprised just about everyone by standing in the pouring rain to announce a July 4 election (a date very few people expected), it came to light that his main protection officer had placed a bet on a July 4 election a few days before the announcement. After that, the scandal grew to encompass the Conservative campaign director, multiple MPs, at least one wife of an MP, and multiple Metropolitan Police officers.
While there is no suggestion that Rishi Sunak instructed anybody to place any bets, it seems clear that he told a few people about the date on which he was going to hold the election, and they thought they could make a few dollars on it. For some this may have been a way of getting something out of their own certain defeat at the polls, while for others it may have just been an opportunity. What’s amazing though is that none of these people seemed to realise that a bunch of bets placed on an unlikely outcome days before the announcement would raise the eyebrows of bookmakers and make them dig into who had placed the bets, or that it might look a bit suspicious that a person with ties to the PM would place a bet on something the PM could conceivably have given them information about.
If one is being uncharitable, one could wonder if perhaps the reason Rishi made the strange pouring-rain announcement was because one of the people who placed a bet rang him up and asked him to hurry up as they needed the payout for their gas bill.
Naturally, I feel a bit left out. It seems that Rishi told everyone except me that he would have a July 4 election. Then again, perhaps he tried. Maybe all of those daily missed calls from a Romanian number were from an agent of his, and they didn’t leave a voicemail because they didn’t want to leave any traces behind.
We have, of course, seen similar things here in Australia. There was a recent case of people with inside information about the Australian Of The Year award getting in trouble for placing bets on what they knew would be the correct outcome. I have to admit I considered doing this one year when I was accidentally sent a copy of the winners list before the announcement, but I didn’t go ahead with it.
I do, however, have my own similar story from the mid-2010s. This didn’t rely on inside information though, and was in fact down to bookmaker error so I couldn’t see any problem with it. After all, the bookmakers can always void a bet if they realise they have made a mistake…but they never did.
My story relates to Time Magazine’s person of the year award. In the mid-2010s, the winner of this award was announced on NBC Today about an hour before it was published on Time Magazine’s website. Australian bookmakers seemed to either be unaware of this, or didn’t care because there was no live airing on NBC Today in this country (Seven aired it early the following morning and received the delayed west coast airing so didn’t have access to the live version). This therefore meant that the betting market remained open for almost a full hour after the announcement was made. So for a few years I would find a not-at-all-legal stream of an east coast NBC affiliate and watch the live announcement of the winner, and then place bets on this outcome wherever I could find decent odds. About an hour later when the announcement was published to Time’s website, I would make a small profit. From memory I think I made about $50 at a time and not all from the same bookmaker, so it wasn’t a big profit but enough to be worthwhile, and generally the winner was one of the favoured outcomes so it probably didn’t seem at all odd or suspicious that someone would bet on it.
I forgot all about it one year, and when I checked again the following year, the bookmakers had worked out that the announcement was being televised prior to online publication and closed their markets at the start of NBC Today, so the loophole was gone.
Was it wrong? Maybe. But I don’t really think so. The bookmakers advertised a closing time matching the time of publication on Time’s website, and I was placing bets based on publicly available information. I wasn’t using secret information. Also, as the bookmakers had the power to retrospectively void bets if they decided the market should have been closed earlier, as far as I was concerned it was their mistake to not know as much as they should have known about their own markets. To my mind, this is not at all the same thing as the naughty fraud of being provided with outcomes ahead of time and betting on them. But maybe that’s just me, and the shades of grey might look different to others.
None-the-less, it does bring me back to Rishi and friends and the broader concept that it is remarkable to me that bookmakers have so many markets where certain people can know the outcome ahead of time. Everything from award winners and interest rate decisions to election dates to who will perform at half time of the Super Bowl. It really seems to be asking for trouble for bookmakers to open themselves up to the possibility that people who know things may bet and go undetected. I’m sure that for all of the ones we’ve heard about lately who have been detected, many many more slip through the net. It also seems to me that if bookmakers have such markets, they should wear the risk of insider knowledge and not be able to void bets or ban or prosecute people after the fact. If they don’t want the risk, they shouldn’t have the market.
But that’s just me. And I know my libertarian viewpoint on such matters doesn’t align, and probably never will align, with any form of regulation.
After the previous rather long video covering the ANZ Horse Ratings and Analyser and how it can be used to improve selections and profitability, this week I am working through a few tutorials on how to set up the Analyser spreadsheet and import data, either to analyse large amounts of previous races or specific types of races, and also how to look ahead at a day’s races and get a listing of the horses which meet your criteria.
Part 1 – Sanitising and importing data
Part 2 – targeting specific days and tracks (with Pebbles’ squeaky ball in the background)
Part 3 – Getting selections before the day’s races begin
In this video I demonstrate how the power of stats and form can be used to improve the selection criteria and the profits in automated betting on horse racing.
The video ended up being a bit longer than I anticipated, and there’s still more to cover in a future video or two, so to help you navigate it, chapters have been added accordingly.
00:00 Introduction
01:49 Recent results
05:13 Configuring stats filters in ANZ Horse Bot
06:24 The stats the bot is using
07:20 The stats engine: ANZ Horse Ratings
11:35 Using the ANZ Ratings Analyser to hone strategies
19:20 Configuring the best performing strategy in the Analyser and Bot
20:20 Building and testing new strategies in the Analyser
25:22 Exploring results in the analyser
27:20 Some high-priced winners from Saturday
28:24 How the bot used the stats to find the winner of Belmont race 4
31:10 Using the analyser to check your strategies are performing as they should
33:38 The settings for the 2nd best strategy
36:01 The first winner for the day pays $8.40
36:51 Summary
Wrapping up the series on finding value by hedging and dutching greyhounds in Hedge Dog Bot, Samuel looks at the results of the various methods tested in recent weeks and highlights the ones which show the most potential for profit.
Continuing from last week’s video of finding value on the dogs by dutching at level stakes, this week I provide an update on results from last week’s strategy, and continue looking for more value at level staking by adding a hedge bet (insurance) on the favourite, with results from some days of that. Plus, the next stage in testing, and some exciting news about the return of British greyhound racing to free to air television.
As a number of people who watch these videos have expressed an interest in level staking, as opposed to the progression or recovery staking systems in most of the videos to date, I have set about trying to find an automated system which can deliver profit with level stakes on the greyhounds. The trick is to find odds which exceed the strike rate of certain runners.
In smaller greyhound fields, the outsiders of the field tend to present this value while still having a reasonable chance of winning races and delivering a profit.
My testing hasn’t all been smooth sailing but it has led me to a system which I’m now testing and has started off well. Here’s a look at what I’ve tested and what I’m doing now. And in a week I’ll come back with more results.
I received an email the other day with some questions about obtaining data from the betting bots I’ve been using and demonstrating, and graphing that data.
For the most part I think it’s a fairly straight forward process, but there’s a few little tips and tricks which can make the data more useful, so I thought it warranted a video.
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.
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.