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A Study of a System Part 1

The following study of a long shot system presented in 2 parts could well apply to any system; however long shots really exacerbate the issues that most punters face when dealing with punting.

Firstly let’s look at the market, the strike rate of all winners over $10 SP is somewhere around 3.3% taken from a sample from 150,000 recent horses. Combined they win about 18.6% of races. The loss is about 45%. These figures will vary slightly based on price source and length of time.

As the data shows, in roughly 20% of races we see the market getting the winner considerably wrong, with a 3.3% strike rate per selection. These market errors don’t occur too frequently and often they don’t pay off for those that are hunting them. However that is a nature of the beast, if you are looking to profit from long-shots you have to find a weakness but you need to accept that since the market is the best overall judge of horses chances in the race, the market is going to be seldom so wrong. Punters need to be looking for a predictable pattern amongst the long shot results which are mixed in with the unpredictable anomalies that no one can capture.

The key phrase is a Predictable Pattern. This should represent a group of horses whose form/analysis suggest that they have a better chance then they appear and capitalise on these. It can be done, however there are many pitfalls waiting for those that attempt to profit from long shots. All of which can be avoided by simply being realistic, having correct bank management strategy and knowing where to bet. The most important factor is not so much finding the winner; it is to manage your emotional state in order to give yourself a chance to find a winner.

One thing that Axis is particularly great at doing is identifying certain market errors. There are occasions when past performance would indicate the horse has little or no chance in the race and yet Axis finds ‘something’ that indicates it does.

Here is a real life example from a system we have:

1600 days (about 4 years)
9062 bets (about 5.5 bets /per day)
6.2% Win strike rate, ONE selection per race.
Betting environment – Betfair
Betting: $10,000 Bank, 1% per bet, constant bet size.
OUTCOME: $84,700 profit!

This ‘Predictable Pattern’ (our long shot system here) runs nearly 80% better than the market average strike rate, (6.2 vs. 3.3) with a good number of selections. Most people would not hesitate to go and take the leap; who could blame them, there is $20,000 begging to be had every year. This is no smoke and mirrors, this is a real system we have had in our arsenal for over a year and half now, making about 9% POT on average.

The issue is that most people would walk away loosing from such a system due to many factors, despite this being a profitable system and the many articles on our website and elsewhere that are trying to prepare them for the REALITY OF BETTING. We are not talking about the nodding of heads, whenever a runs of outs, bank risk and emotional self management is mentioned, but actually UNDERSTANDING AND DEALING with them, when (not if) these realities come along.

In Part 2 we will look at the key reasons why most people would fail using the above system and what to do in order to avoid them.