Before online betting came along I was amazed at the betting shop punters who’d fool themselves into thinking they were in profit…
You’d see them celebrating after a few winners. “I’ve had it!” they would cry.
I would ask whether they were up for the day to which they’d reply. “I’m not sure but hey, a winner is a winner!”
In fairness I think we’ve all been guilty at some stage of shouting about our winners… and keeping quite about the losers.
But if you want to part bookies from their money there comes a day when you have to be honest with yourself and record everything – win or lose. Despite how hard it may be when you hit your 14th loser in a row!
Some punters have what I call ‘losing amnesia’, where they remember and shout about the winners and forget, or conveniently bury, the losers to the back of their mind.
Some even take this a step further in their everyday lives. You know the sort that sets the weighing scales a tad before the ‘0’ before they step on in order to show they actually weigh less than they really do!
Of course they’re only kidding themselves and it won’t help them in the betting/trading game, especially when it comes to playing with real money.
Maybe they’re just after the buzz of a winner, at any cost.
Whatever the reason, this really sorts out those wanting to earn living from this game and those who want to get rid of their disposable income (and fast!) for a quick buzz.
That’s why when I started to get serious the first step was to keep notes containing my P/L, win or lose.
Then further down the line I would add further notes on the race type and ground conditions. This would quickly isolate where profits could be added to by sticking with certain races or staying away from certain ground conditions and/or courses.
To this day my notes are in notebook format. Not very technical I know but it does the job and I find it quicker than entering them in spreadsheets for the numerous strategies I could potentially use daily.
I’m not even sure spreadsheets were around back in the day. If they were, they were only used by the most advanced of computer users with their large BBC micro to record data on.
Where spreadsheet recording does come in handy is when you can look back and filter ‘in’ or ‘out’ certain values to see if any winning patterns emerge.
I am currently organising a football method for beta testing and it’s one that’s already looking very exciting pre-test.
It simply follows a combo of in-play stat filters that have shown to produce a very nice profit over a very decent sample of data.
This indicates that we could have hit on what I call ‘a rich vein of gold’ filter wise, or as they say in the westerns “there could be gold in them there hills!”
I have to admit I’m very excited about this project, and more news will be forthcoming as and when I get the feedback from beta testers with regards to their real-time betting experience.
For now, do make sure you keep some form of notes whether it’s in excel or manually using blank pages from your old-school, flock-wallpaper-covered exercise books. Even in basic format you’ll be amazed at what it can reveal when you look back over your records.
For example, I once spotted I never had a single winner on heavy going with the type of horses I centred on. It was therefore blatantly obvious I should delete such ‘heavy going’ meetings from my daily shortlist to improve my profits.