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.