NZ Under 17 footy team!

Ive been out all day at footy training and I get home, play the recording of NZ's under 17 boys teams last game at the Under 17 world cup and we are 1-0 down in the 91st minute when we score a stunning equalizer. So what? Well it means the the NZ team qualify from the group stages to the knock out section, so what? Well its the first time any NZ footy team has ever got past the group stage at any FIFA tournament.
Big day for footy fans in a rugby mad country.


btw at the footy trials there was a young girl who showed up with a Liverpool kit on and the name Torres on her shirt. I gave her a teasing about it and then discovered she was the outstanding trialist on show. She got the highest score from all the selectors which just goes to show you should never judge a book by its cover..... hahahahaha

Quick note on the footy.

Aberdeen lost 2-0 at home but on the good news front Torquay won and the dream of staying in the 2nd div is still alive. I know its early in the season but Torquay have a tough job ahead of them.

And just to wind up all you Liverpool boys out there, you were already 2-1 down before the sending offs. Liverpool fans blind loyalty to the cause means they just dont see the bigger picture, its an admirable trait but misguided.

I remember the Liverpool of the 70's and 80's and you lot used to be the team people would watch because the quality was so great and the style was attractive to watch. Sorry but its awful football these days and Liverpool have no depth to their squad despite the huge number of players going through the revolving door at liverpool.

Rafa, its simple, get your team to pass pass pass and pass some more and nothing lofted, keep it on the deck, the sky is for the birds.

Im not a Liverpool fan so why do I care? Well Liverpool used to be a great team to watch, now  they are like watching Bolton. Its ugly and nobody likes ugly.

31/10

Im not blindly using the fav win system, to make that work I need to make sure I eliminate the errors at my end and one of the main culprits was interruptions during a meeting which caused me to miss key bets. So if I dont think I am going to have a few hours during a meeting where I am uninterrupted i will just use the fav place system.
 Yesterday I had football coaching during the day  and then last night I wanted to watch the Frost/Nixon movie on tv so I used the fav place system for all the races while I switched  between the movie and the 30 seconds before a race started to make a bet.  $4.60 profit on the night. Today I have a day of football representative selecting and will miss a fair number of meetings before I finish so tonight will also end up being place fav betting only.

30/10

8 races $3.10 profit, didnt take too long and went out for the evening. A pretty fleeting effort tonight.

Ive made this mistake before...

Listening to pundits before a race starts....

I had the fav checked to pop a place bet on and the tv is running and 4 racing pundits all were adamant that another horse would win. They each gave to my inexperienced ear very compelling reasons why a horse was going to win that race. Seeing that the dividends on offer were reasonably close between the fav and the pundit recommendation I decided to go with their pick. Of course the horse came stone motherless last. Do they do this on purpose??? Is it fixed? its not the first time I have seen this.

My Blog List...

Its kind of huge to be honest...
I do however as part of my morning ritual with a cup of coffee browse all the ones which were recently updated. I had absolutely no idea there were so many people out there doing this stuff and there are some great reads among them too. Lots of variation on what and how people are doing things, some great advice too.

Cheers.

Gentle start

10 races bet on tonight and $6.10 profit. I should be able to retire by the year 2123

Slight changes

Ok most of you are betting/trading on a more serious scale than me and my approach relies on probabilty and statistics which throws up a few problems. Firstly because I only bet on a meeting till I get a win I have the problem of not betting on the rest of a meeting when a horse comes in for me on the 1st race. That seems like an awful waste of opportunity with 8 or more races not bet on. I cant change the win bet strategy I have simply because as I have found out in the past sometimes there is only 1 fav winner in a race meeting and it might just have been the first race.
So I have come up with a way based on place betting to enable me to continue betting on a race meeting after my horse has won. Its pretty much a variation on what I am doing with the win betting where I increase the stake each time after I dont get a result until I do get a result, also with a stop point. Now because place dividends are so low I have had to increase my stakes dramatically to make sure the process returns a profit.

So my sequence of stakes are $1, $5, $15, $45, $135, $400.  Now the manner that these increases sends out alarm signals, what if the $400 bet doesnt come through, thats quite a loss to deal with. Well I went through the NZ racing board website results for the last 2 years and never once came up with a race meeting where the favourite didnt come in for a place by the 6th race, in fact only 3 times in 2 years did it get to the point of going as far as the 5th race. So essentially I am gambling heavily on the fact that having to place a $400 place bet is extremely unlikely. Its possible and Im prepared for that but its extremely unlikely. I also casually went through the Australian racing board results and didnt see any 6th race events and also very few 5th race events. We will see what happens here. Every system has its flaws I think. But thats betting/gambling isnt it? Although most of you are trading with betfair which looks like a different kettle of fish.

The other slight change here is that via my win bet process my first 2 bets for a meeting will be each way bets. This will help me to snatch a few more pennies from the first or second race wins I get which come up more frequently than other races, after the first 2 races I will then go back to betting wins and places seperately. Sounds complicated? probably is but I have my little spreadsheets set up to keep the idiot in me mostly controlled.

The other main thing is trying to make sure that I can eliminate individual errors. Thats where about 90% of my losses have come from and there have only been a few times where the probability side has actually kicked me in the butt.

One last thing is the psychology element. Chasing winners is a little stressful at times but the place result side comes in very frequently. The returns are tiny but it does help to keep me upbeat.

Anyway only a few races bet on tonight, I only went down the place system side of it and from 6 races made $3.20. While I havent been betting money over the last few weeks I have been mucking around with  an imaginary bank and the place thing while giving tiny returns per race did end up providing just on $100 for the last 2 weeks.  It means I can happily bet on multiple meetings confident that i am going to be heading in the positve direction.

Ok im back

Righto, back in to it.  Im having to start with a smaller bank because instead of using the football coaching money for this "venture" I ended up buying a new mac for work with it. So the restart bank is $500, it was going to be about $3000 but I really needed the new mac, my new camera pumps out far too big files for my old mac to handle. Also I have a fair amount of evening football coaching about to start up and I wont be able to bet as many meetings as i had been.
There is a slight change going to happen to what I do with place bets having their own little system which is not much of an earner but a consistent winner, I will elaborate shortly.

Sods law...

While Im not betting at present I am still keeping track of the racing stats and as luck would have it over the last week in the race meetings I would have bet on there has been the unusual occurrence of 3 meetings with the fav not winning till the 7th race. What does that mean to me? Well basically it means that if I had been betting on the meetings this week I would have been looking at a profit of about $510 for the week..... bugger.


In the meantime I have come up with another system based around my current one but this time using place bets. In the testing using historical data and also over the last week it works very well in terms of successes however its very conservative in terms of winnings.  When Im ready to start up again Im going to run two accounts at the TAB, one for the win bet system and one for the place bet system.

Footy bet

I still havent replaced the TAB account money yet, waiting on a payment for a job but there is a small amount left in the account so decided to have a small punt on the footy.

Had a close look at the world cup qualifiers and being a football fanatic couldnt help myself. Bet on the Uruguay and Argentina game and was quite amazed at the odds on offer.

Despite Maradona's record so far and the British press conscious or subconscious desire for him to fail Argentina are a team full of superb players and for them to miss out on an automatic qualifying spot simply wouldnt happen. I do wonder if the bias against Maradona in the press has an impact on the bookies odds. Argentina hadnt been playing well and Uruguay are a good side with some talented players but I really couldnt see Argentina losing. Add in the last second heroics of the last game for Argentina and you are looking at a side with rising confidence.

So I did the dutch betting thing on Argentina to win or draw with the odds at $2.45 for an Argentina win and $3.20 for the draw  and with Argentina winning came out with a small $5 win overall.

A quick thanks!

Thanks to those who offer thoughts and advice. Im completely new to all this and I will no doubt ask lots of dumb questions in the future but I take all comments and advice seriously.
Cheers

Footy Betting question???

For those of you betting on the football... I think most of you are trading rather than straight out betting but how many of you have looked at applying the Dutch betting system using two bookies. I have been looking at this and found that the bookies sort their odds on a game so that you cant use the Dutch betting system but if you take the odds at one bookie on team A and the odds on team B at another bookie you can end up with a garaunteed profit.
I suspect Im missing something important here as it seems too good to be true.

For example

Lithuania V Serbia this weekend.

TAB in NZ has $3.50 Lithuania and $2.00 Serbia

TABonline Aussie has  $3.00 Lithuania and $2.15 serbia

So if I were to take the NZ TAB odds for Lithuania and the Aussie TAB odds for serbia I could apply the Dutch betting sytem and get a positive outcome.

Lithuania	5/2	desired profit£20.00	stake£24.00	£84.00	Profit £20.00
Serbia	11/10	£20.00	£40.00	£84.00	£20.00
		Total Stake =	£64.00

Im sure i must be missing something here....

Have to suspend betting for a week or so

For those of you out there who know what its like being self employed can be a battle at times. I have just had a client go belly up owing me a decent little sum of money. Nothing which will cause me too much grief but enough that Im scrambling for money to pay a few bills. I have the choice of breaking a term deposit or raiding what i have made from this venture and its going to be raiding this account.  I will be able to replace it in about a week. The up side of course is if I hadnt made what I have on this over the last 7 or 8 weeks I would have had to break a term deposit.

The glass is always half full in my world :-)

1st no Fav win meeting

Quick summary of tonights balls up....


I had the first true no favourite winning meeting since I started all this about 8 weeks ago. I also had 2 meetings that I got spooked on and pulled out of at the 4th race taking relatively modest losses. Both meetings were Harness meetings which i have said I wouldnt bet on because of low dividend issues, well these two meetings did produce fav winners after i stopped but they wouldnt have helped much because they had very low win dividends. So I have had an $83 loss because of 1 true no fav win meeting and my own lack of following my own rules... On the positive I did manage my losses well on the no fav win meeting and instead of that meeting giving me a $128 loss it produced only a $65 loss. The other $18 from tonight  came from me being a dumbarse.  


Im about 7 weeks in and still learning all the little tricks and quirks of making my system work.  Bugger.

Ok some help here please....

Ok, now as most are aware Im pretty new to this whole horse racing thing so forgive me if this appears to be the dumbest most basic of all questions....

Im doing some research on quinella chances in dog racing but every now and then i come across recorded odds that arent as easy for a noob like me to understand. Normally the odds here are portrayed as 1/1 2/2 3/3 etc.
Can you guys look at the 2 screen shots for me and tell me what are the 1st 2nd and 3rd favourites in each screenshot and also add an explanation. Pretend I have the brain of a small goldfish when you explain it.... hahahaha.

  

Oct 6

$8.60 yesterday, $8.30 today. Nothing too exciting, at some point I will increase my bank and start betting with a higher base bet, maybe about 5 times what Im doing now. I just need to keep going and satisfy myself that I have a certain level of comfort and consistency.

Having trouble  uploading a screenshot for today, will try later.

 Bank total up to $1017.90.

Greyhound racing????

Anybody bother with the greyhounds? I had looked at it in the past but found the dividends too low to work within my system and I really didnt like how often collisions  impacted on races.
However I have found the local greyhound associations website with results for the last couple of years and  they include the odds for the races. Im currently popping all this info into my spread sheet tester and it appears  doing quinellas for the two top favs within my system might work quite well. We shall see....

Staking Plan - Betting Ratio's

Ok so I am using my own variation of the dreaded Martingale sequence but with a stopping point for protection of my bank and also with the ability to allow me to vary how much i bet based on how I feel a race meeting is panning out.
However along with that I have had to work out how much I want to bet relative to my bank. Ultimately I have come up with the ratio's below. Early on I was using a ratio that was a bit riskier in terms of eating into my bank if i had a loss day based on a no fav win meeting.
The base ratio's I have come up with are probably a bit conservative but the amusing thing is that the longer this goes on the more protective I have become of my bank. Sort of a case where I have worked hard to get it to this level and I really cant stand losing any of it at all.

I have set the limit of races in a row I will bet on without a win to 8. That came about from research using historic data of race meetings here in NZ and Australia going back for 12 months. I found if I used a 7 race stop point I made a certain profit but if I was brave and went 1 more I made a considerable gain over 7 races. This isnt foolproof however as the stats and probability Im basing this on could be different in a years time. There is a trade off of course and that is the fact that now I am making less per bet on the 1st and 2nd race fav wins.
I will take another look at this situation in about a month or so.

Hope it makes sense.

New Target

Ok my new target isnt a number, its to reduce errors. Looking at my records of September I find that I had 12 days where I made a loss which surprised me. Especially since I was able to take $382 out of the account and deposit in a bank account. Every loss day i had from my notes can be attributed to some mistake I have made. So knocking back the mistakes in my betting should help improve my winnings.

Mon 5th October, sticking to the rules....

1st race up on the NZ tote was actually the second race up at the meeting in Australia. Didnt realize until I had made my bet on the true 2nd race. Then I had one of those ones where I picked the fav based on the Aussie tote and then after I made my bet the fav changed, my horse no longer the fav. The fav wins and I have a loss in the second race I bet on. So I pulled the plug on that meeting. I am now watching the rest of the meeting, its a heavy track and its now race 5 with the favs not winning in the last races. Ive pulled the plug because in the first two races the fav has won. I had bet on race 2 and 3 mistakenly. A loss of $4 for this meeting, happy to take the small loss based on previous experiences.

Made a modest $7.60 today, it would have been $11.60 if not for the 1st meeting shenanighans. There are 3 Harness meetings in Australia i could bet on but Im done for the day. I checked the history of the 3 venues and while there are plenty of fav wins there all the winning fav dividends were to low for me to bother with. Anyway i have real world work things i need to deal with.

Loss recovered

Ok, a good evenings effort, back on track with the balance back over the $1000 mark. Its a funny thing how when I have a day where there is a loss I have the impending feeling that its all about to fall over  but so far I seem to recover each time.

So I will now start again trying to get to my $500 target withdrawn from the account by the end of October however I  may struggle a bit here as work commitments are set to get in the way of betting time. A more realistic target for the month will probably only be about $250.

 BTW Im sorry but I cant view this as trading, Im betting, gambling on horses, its that simple. The only thing is I think I have come up with a system that will over time produce small consistent profits but its still betting on horses...

1st race favourites

Im sure Im not dreaming but it appears to me that about 40% of the race meetings i bet on have the favourites in the first race winning. Is this done on purpose so that punters start the day feeling like winners and then get sucked in to parting with their cash as the day goes on?

And how can i maximise this within what im doing?

A loss and catch up

I squeezed in one last meeting on the last day of September. First two races gave me losses and then on the 3rd race I waited till 10 seconds before start time to see what the fav was and then make my bet. After I made my bet i checked again and lo and behold the fav had changed. My horse came 3rd and the new fav won. This was the 3rd race in the meeting so at this point my losses were just $8. I should have stopped and taken that loss but decided to carry on and wouldnt you know it but there were no more fav winners for the meeting. I ended up making a $37.90 loss for the evening.
I then had a few days work which kept me away from this which was a nice break.  and then today i set about grabbing back what I had lost.  I won back $26.50 today which leaves me $13.40 short of my base  balance of $1000.

A bit of a recap

I think I need to outline what Im doing as coherently as i can so here goes....

My approach is to view a race meeting as a single profit making entity so if it takes 1 race or 5 to   get a win doesnt matter.  There is a distinction here and its important, a $1 profit from a race meeting is the same for me as a $1 profit from a single race. the moment I win at a meeting i move on to the next meeting. At the beginning of a day I will list the various meetings Im betting at, usually about 4 or 5 and I tick each one off as I get a win.

Firstly I use a sequence as a multiplier for my bets up to the 7th number in the sequence.
So if Im using my base bet as $2 for example the sequence Im using as the multiplier is 1,1 2,4,8,16,32 which equates to bets of $2, $2, $4, $8, $16, $32, $64.

I am only betting on favourites determined by the local tote. If  the first fav i pick doesnt win i then bet on the next race at the meeting with the next multiplier  and so on. So for example if i have hit the 5th race in the meeting I would be betting $16.

The reason I stop at the 7th multiplier in the sequence is so that I dont end up destroying my bank by continuing to double my bets. I have also decided that I am happy to wear a loss where there is a no fav win meeting of approx 1/5th to 1/6th of my bank.  This relates for example in that when i am using a bank of $1000 my base bet is $2 and if I had a no fav win loss it would come to $128. The $128 is the total of the $2, $2, $4.....$64 added.

So if I have a bank of $2000 I would be then using a base bet of about $4.

The moment I get a win at a meeting I dont bet again at that meeting, even if its the first race. The chance is that I have  within the laws of probability hit the only fav to win at that meeting. I have had this happen twice where i have won on the first race and then continued to bet and there hasnt been another fav at the meeting and i ended up having a loss.

The sequence I am now using as a rough guide and i adjust depending on the dividend and how open the field is.  For example if Im up to the 3rd bet in the sequence and I see a fav is only paying a dividend of $1.6 that will clearly mean i make a loss if it wins so i will adjust up my bet. If im in a sequence of races and it feels like a race with too many horses can win and the dividends of the top 3 horses are all up around $4 or $5 I will adjust down my bet so its still making a profit if i get a win but I will end up with a smaller loss if it loses.

Im trying to retain some flexibility in what Im doing to suit my growing knowledge of racing.

Hope thats clear, feel free to ask any questions.