The following points are areas of betting where many punters often get it wrong. My views arise from long personal experience and years of communication with unsuccessful and successful punters alike.
The first step to formulating a solution, is to define the problem.
Read the following thoughts and you may be able to side step many of the pot holes others have fallen into in the past.
My aim here is to highlight these common areas of failure in the hope that I can speed up your learning curve towards successful betting.
1) Failure to Use Betting Banks
Most gamblers fail to understand that the best method of achieving a sustained and healthy long term profit from racing is to set aside a sum of money away from your main finances, solely for the betting of horses.
A punter with a professional attitude will set aside what he can comfortably afford to invest and then determine the best use he can make of that fixed sum of capital.
The vast majority of punters fail to use any form of set aside bank. They bet randomly with what ever money they have in their pocket at the end of the week or go in too deep with stakes far in excess of their personal safety levels.
Whatever method or system you are using, whoever you are subscribing or following to or however your own bets are calculated, you are better off with a “Betting Bank” that has built -in advantages that can help you. Emotion is a factor that threatens all punters.
With a fixed sum of capital available you now move on to the next reason for failure.
The size of your betting bank will of course be dependant upon your own individual circumstances and free capital available. An analogy to the world of shares perhaps may be that no financial advisor worth his salt would advise you throw all your capital into the stock market alone.
2) Failure to Stake Correctly
It is vital that you consider your betting bank as capping in amount. Your betting bank and staking should be adapted for the method you use.
You must in advance, prepare yourself for the possibility of a worse than average sequence of losers through adoption of a sufficient number of units in your betting bank.
Correct methodical staking in addition to the mathematical advantage, can also help overcome the risk of emotional reaction to a sequence of negative or unusually positive results.
Take the Pricewise column in the racing post as an example. Long term, if you could get on at the advised prices, it would have returned a decent profit overall. During this time however followers would have to have endured runs of up to 40 losers in a row!
Despite the overall long term profit I suspect the vast majority of Pricewise followers would have been terminated either by a failure to set aside a sufficient amount of points or through failure to cope with the emotion of the losing run.
We have long since established here a strike rate of about 35% on our Best Bet selections and at an average S.P. of over 5/2 for each winning bet. We feel able to protect clients banks as long losing runs haven’t happened and the strike rate and odds have been more than enough to ensure long steady and safe growth for your betting profits.
3) Chasing Losses
Many punters will alter their stakes in the last race either to
” chase” losses or “play up” winnings. Its no coincidence that the
The secret is waiting for opportunities and only betting when you know you have circumstances that favor you and not the bookmakers. You must never change your approach or deviate from sensible staking as there is no such things as “The Last Race”.
Chasing losses is a game for the ill informed who do not want to make the effort to seek value in their bets. Bookmakers have to price
Punters don’t have to play in every race, they can pick the races they want to bet in, and that is the main edge that people fail to understand. If you have had a losing day, by attempting to chasing your losses you give up that advantage and bet on the races that you should not be betting in.
Chasing losses at first sight may appear to be an easy way to guarantee the true story but an eventual profit is it is a game for fools and statistically will not work unless you generate an overall level stakes profit.
4) Lack of Value Appreciation
Everyone has this “Foresight” on occasions, it is a game
The old cliche is that value is about betting a horse whose true chance is better than its price reflects. You also have to make sure that you bet in the right way and in the right races as that is the only way you can keep strike rates high and protect a betting bank.
You should continually strive to increase the value in your bets. Once you have a selection you feel is value do not just take the first acceptable price that comes along. Seek to improve it by shopping around the various bookmakers or try and top the best bookmakers price by looking to the betting exchanges.
Appreciation of “value” in a bet is core to long term success.
To profit over a long series of bets, you must be betting at odds greater than the true chance of winning your selection have. To do this however over the long term, you need to concentrate on each race individually and seek the value bet in that race.
There is value to be had in every race. The key to it is understanding
Many times a punter will screw up a losing betting slip and say “At least I had some value”. A 33/1 chance may be diabolical value yet a very short priced favorite may be the supreme value. It does not follow that the bigger the price you take the better “value” you have.
Marginal improvements on odds on each bet you make can have a dramatic effect on long term profits.
5) Greed For Instant Wealth
Yes your win double can produce a much bigger win from the same stake however over the long term the bookmaker is eating away at your capital at a much faster rate.
It is a long slow process of sustained and serious profit and not a game for Get Rich Quick schemers. You will see they are all multiple bets. Bookmakers want you betting in multiples and it is easy to see why.
yourself why.
Most professionals bet singles and steer away from the multiple bets. The reason they are heavily touted is the profit margin in the bookmaker’s favor increases the more selections you add to your multiple bet.
You may say that many “Pros,” do bet in multiples in bets like The Scoop 6 or the Jackpot, but that’s only because they know there is plenty of “Dead” money in any given Pool and they are betting against people who don’t understand the dynamics of those types of bet. There are times you should bet in multiples but in truth they are few and far between.
It is a waste of time debating which type of multiple bet is ‘best’. Unless your prediction skills are supernatural or you are incredibly lucky, then betting in singles is more often the best option.
Say you select any random 5/1 selections. , if you bet this as a single the bookmaker may have a theoretical edge in his favor of 15%.. Taking two such selections however and betting them in a win double, the bookmakers profit margin rises to about 30%!
Many punters seek the thrill of a life changing bet that will produce huge gains of instant wealth for a small outlay. Bookmakers play on your natural desire and go out of their way to encourage you to bet exotic multiple selection bets that can in one hit, turn a small stake into a large sum.
6) Lack of Discipline
It takes great discipline to NOT bet at times. It takes discipline to say no to that small fun bet.
Lack of Discipline is the big hurdle for punters trying to turn a losing
hobby into a winning one. Bookmakers know that. That’s why in every
betting office you can bet on numbers, lotteries, ball games, racing from all over the globe with horses nobody has heard of before and even now computer animated, or as they call it, virtual racing.
Being a long term successful punter is like swimming against the tide. It takes an effort to stay still, even greater effort to move ahead and as soon as you slack or relax off you start going backwards.
Punters come in all sizes and shapes. Even the shrewder punters who could win at the game, fall into the trap of lack of discipline
of study. After a winning period they forget that what made them winners in the first place, was the effort they put in. They fall victim to
indiscipline, overconfidence and laziness.
Even more experienced regular gamblers who are savvy enough to turn down bets that they know are stupid always let themselves
down by continually bleeding their profits with a fun tenner here and a fun tenner there.
Bookmakers just believe that it’s a case of punters sitting all day betting on what ever is put in front of them and sadly they are right in many cases.They are simply thrill seeking and don’t care what they bet on, as long as they can bet. There is no methodology at all and many betting office regulars are simply a bunch of headless chickens prepared to pay long term for the warming buzz of the occasional win.
7) Emotion
They have an in built psychological factor that makes them feel like
losers and they have been conditioned to losing by years of doing so.
Examples of emotive gambling include punters following a horse, trainer or a jockey blind. The “Hype” horses are cannon fodder for emotional punters.
Betting is a lonely game. Its also a highly skilled game. Emotion
With betting, the laws of market supply and demand, dictate that long term, the sheep will get fleeced. We are all emotional in betting but the players at the top of the tree have this down to a fine art and can control those emotions. Other punters have long since been conditioned by bookmakers to EXPECT to lose rather than win.
Emotion also prevents people from advanced betting subjects such laying, hedging and arbitrage. Emotion forces some punters to bet horses with certain names that remind them of loved ones.
Emotional punters lose their heads in barren times and fail to capitalise on winning runs. The more emotion you can rule out of your betting, the more successful you will become. Once you can master your emotions, you have made the first big step to betting profitably.
8) The Grass is Greener
A competition to win best garden will be won by the person who
can spend most time in the garden and master its challenges, the
gardener who is prepared to care about his garden and invest in the tools that will help his garden grow and keep the weeds at bay.
Many punters change methods and approaches so quickly that they don’t give any method a true test. It is the same as gamblers who write down every bet they have. Once they have a few losers, they often lose the heart to do this and stop doing so and move on to another area.
They are like children with new toys at Christmas. They never stay with any method long enough to prosper. They always feel the” Grass is Greener”, when in truth the “Grass” they are using has been abused and left to deteriorate.
It’s the same with betting. If you can make a concentrated effort of learning and research in one key area rather than flitting from this to that, you will do far better long term.
They want the next Big “new idea” or “method” and that doesn’t work either as the fault lies not in the Grass, but the Gardener.
They have no long term consistency in their betting and are constantly tinkering with what wasn’t broken or moving on in search of the holy grail before a full evaluation of what they are currently examining has been completed.
9) Laziness
They refuse to study and spend hours looking at how they can win at betting. You can’t refuse to spend money, just look at the racing for 30 minutes and expect to win long term. If it was that easy, then millions would do it.You must either invest in your betting, or pay someone to do just that.
My philosophy is simple. If a bookmaker, journalist or odds compiler spend 3 hours on a race then I’ll spend 6 hours on that race to gain the edge, I believe that.
That is true about both golf and betting.Most people can’t spend 12 hours a day studying betting as they have families, jobs, commitments and lead their own lives. We do that study for you and re-invest money in our betting so that we can find every edge possible to Help You Win.
Lazy punters are cannon fodder for the bookmakers. They make little or no effort in their selection process nor make an effort to extract maximum returns from their bets.
10) Stupidity!
We have long since established here a strike rate of about 35% on our Best Bet selections and at an average S.P. of over 5/2 for each winning bet. Punters don’t have to play in every race, they can pick the races they want to bet in, and that is the main edge that people fail to understand. If you have had a losing day, by attempting to chasing your losses you give up that advantage and bet on the races that you should not be betting in. You also have to make sure that you bet in the right way and in the right races as that is the only way you can keep strike rates high and protect a betting bank.
Amazingly most punters fail to learn from their mistakes. They continue for years making the same basic errors time and time again. Pure stupidity.
Your bookmaker may have been laughing at you for years. You have it in your power, however to improve your betting and hopefully wipe that smile from his face for good.
Most professionals bet singles and steer away from the multiple bets.
Strive to improve your betting performance by continually learning from the mistakes and weakness is your game.
