Knowing the Source of Your Punting Success

by Matt Elliott

When devising your betting strategies, do you take a step back and ask yourself why you believe your new system will be profitable? Or, do you simply try and narrow in on picking winners with the thought being more winners equals more money?

It is interesting to note that many punters subscribe to the thought that the only thing that matters is that a betting approach works; that it has made money in the past. As contradictory as this may sound, I don't agree with this line of thinking.

If you are making money, who cares why it works? The only thing you may be concerned about is the fact that your system DOES work and hopefully will continue to provide profitable bets.

This mindset is fraught with danger. How can you expect an approach to continue to prove profitable if you can't narrow in on exactly why your approach is profitable? It is one thing to check the past results to see how you would have performed using a certain betting approach, but it is another to use historical data solely to derive your betting methods. Many punters who discover a good approach do so by back-fitting past results. That is; simply look at what has worked in the past by analysing historical data, as opposed to adopting the reasoning and the logic behind a betting approach first, then testing the historical performance. Once you have a conceptually sound approach, then and only then should a punter go back and see how it has performed in the past.

I will use an example to illustrate. You may notice that the Gai Waterhouse runners generally have a greater margin of improvement early in their campaigns. Therefore, to determine whether the betting market takes this dramatic improvement fully into account, an historical database can be used to back test its' performance.

Hopefully you will find that such runners provide a return much greater than 'blindly' backing other runners in the similar price range. This finding may not be enough to show a profit. You may find that if you backed every Gai Waterhouse runner over the past 12 months which is second up from a spell, you would lose 4% on turnover at Starting Prices. This is still a loss, but it is a considerable improvement on what you would expect to lose by backing a runner blindly.

This theory may form the foundation of the success of your betting system. You have identified a situation where the betting market are under-betting certain types of runners or even certain types of runners in different bet types.

Similarly, you may believe that runners draw out wide are under-bet. Even the most basic of punter recognises that runners drawn an inside barrier do have an increased chance of winning. However you may believe that punters place more importance on this than they should. As a result, runners drawn in wide barriers may be under-bet in the pools, making them good bets. This illustrates the fundamental difference between finding winning bets and finding good bets which we have discussed on numerous occasions in the past.

You could use this theory as the basis for your betting approach and mould a profitable method. This is an example of developing a betting theory first, then testing its profitability using historical data.

As a side note, Garry Robinson of Winform racing is currently working on a new book on barriers where he considers such situations as we have mentioned above. From speaking with Garry recently, he has found a number of very interesting ( and potentially profitable ), situations by analysing the returns on backing runners drawn in various barriers. I look forward to getting my hands on this publication to see exactly how much importance punters place on barriers drawn.

Many punters seem to run the system test first; discover what has been profitable, and then proceed to use their newly created approach. A punter cannot expect an approach to continue to be profitable unless their approach is based on sound logic and reason rather than on the historical performance alone. Ideally, you would also use what statisticians refer to as a 'hold-out' sample which is essentially 'live' tracking of the performance of the approach.

I am sure you would have noted many systems which have rules where you can't put your finger on the exact reason to why they would make a system profitable. Ask yourself; why would the betting market would be under-betting a form factor? For rules such as . . . 'the horse must have been in the two top in betting at its last start', I find it difficult to understand why this would result in a profitable betting scenario. Why would it be that runners that started favourite at their last start be under-bet in the current race? There are may be legitimate reasons why these runners are under-bet. However, I don't believe it would be something worth pursuing.

Rules such as ' you should not bet on fillies or mares racing against colts / geldings / entires ', do have a logical basis. At least you can explain why it may be that the betting market would not take the unpredictability of fillies and mares fully into account.

You could teach a monkey to back fit past results to come up with a profitable system. It is the skilled punters who come up with the real 'gold' by using their knowledge and skills to identify situations where the market consistently under or over-bets a runner and they use this information as a basis for a profitable approach. ( The market over-betting a runner provides opportunities through either backing other runners in a race or by laying the runner on a betting exchange. )

I hope that this article will spark some debate over the importance of identifying the logic behind profitable approaches. I never use an approach, whether it is a sports betting or horse racing, unless it is based solid foundations where I can identify the reason(s) why it works. Those foundations may revolve around getting into the heads of other punters and explain why an idea may be successful. If I can't pin point exactly why an approach may be profitable, I simply won't use it regardless of the historical return.

In summary, consider the real reason to why your approach may be profitable. Spend some time identifying the factors which the betting market is consistently under-valuing and incorporate them into your approach to make it profitable.

This article is protected by international Copyright © Elk Publications Pty Ltd February 2005 Please contact if you wish to reproduce this article elsewhere.