PS your mate might want to check his facts.  I've just done a quick search and came up with an 8 runner meeting at Catterick in 2001 when 8 favs won from 8 races on the card.

I'm fairly sure it happened at two consecutive Thirsk meetings.

Couldn't resist popping back briefly for one quick post on this..  The idea's one of the most idiotic and poorly thought out ever on Betfair. If he's using Martingales he's going to run out of liquidity after only a few races.

Let's say every favourite goes off at 4.0 and we disregard commission charges.... He lays the first one at 4.0. If he wants to make £300, then he's looking at a loss of £900 if that favourite wins.

Race 2. He now has to win back £900 and put on an extra £300 in order to make his profit. He lays the next fave at 4.0 with a bet of £1200. If this fave wins, he's looking at having lost £3600 on the race, plus the £900 he lost on the first race. Total losses £4,500

Race 3. He now has to win back £4,500 and put on an extra £300 in order to make his profit. He lays the next fave at 4.0 with a bet of £4,800. If this one loses he's looking at having lost £14,400 on the race, plus the £4,500 he lost on the first two races. Total losses £18,900.

If he's not finding it difficult to place a bet on the market due to liquidity at this point, then he's going to find it absolutely impossible should a fourth fave go in in a row. And he'll basically have lost all of his money by that point in any case. 

It doesn't get much better with lower odds. If he's restricting himself to an average of 3.0, I estimate by the time four faves have won, he'll be needing to recoup £24K. There just isn't going to be the liquidity to allow him to carry on going. And the fifth fave winning in a row (which does happen every so often) will kill him completely.

It's a dire dire system. Plechy, I'm assuming this is your system rather than one of a 'friend'. Don't do it. You're simply going to lose your money.

(There should have been a p u f f of wind in the middle of that quote. Seems Betfair censors wind now!)

excellent example LordBobbin.. i once layed 4-5 horses in a row and they all won!! so such losing streaks are definitely possible

Plechy just in case he's still not convinced, two other points occur to me that haven't been mentioned as far as I've seen. You mention the phrase "release of equity", which suggests to me that he was planning to borrow the money. It's a long time since I mortgaged/borrowed and I'm not right up to date but I'd imagine it would cost him at least £4k a year to service the debt so that's £4k he needs to make annually just to stand still. Secondly, my knowledge of horse racing is very limited, apart from Frankel (wink icon)I've not backed or laid a horse in years, but as far as I know it's not uncommon for favouritism in a market to change hands shortly before the off. That could mess up his system, he lays a horse at 4-1, market leader at the time he gets matched, only to find it wins the race at 9-2, with another horse which started 7-2 favourite finishing back down the field. So the favourite lost but so did your mate. I realise that could work for him as well as against him but the potential upside will only ever be £300 daily profit while the potential downside will be a great deal higher. And it ruins his idea that all the favourites winning in a day only happens once every x number of years.

my take on fulltime punting is that i reckon horses are a waste of time..............others may think otherwise

I think your mates system has already been debunked, but I will throw my 2 cents in.
I don't believe for a second that laying every favourite in every race will send you broke.  Why would it?  Very possible to lay every favourite in every race as a source of income, and 100,000 would easily be enough bankroll to do it.  Not sure about 300 a day, but definately 200 would be attainable on that sort of bankroll.
Problem for your mate though, is this is reliant on market reading, as the value is obtained through laying at better than average price.  The simple fact that your mate would be blindly laying at whatever price, and stopping at 300 for the day is just ridiculous and proves that he has no concept of how to actually make money punting.  The only way to profit from the punt, is to be betting at value.  You can't do that going in blind.

As for horses being a waste of time, there are many professionals making a living betting on them (with edges) w/out inside info.

I make a small second income but am not professional. I look for a margin 5-8 times as big as contrarian's by making a selective book and arbing at the big meetings. I also take on a few naked back bets. On a massive week like Royal Ascot, I wd be cycling 200k + through the markets.

Temperamentally I wd be unhappy to lose, but this is a hobby for me and not something that I think I can make more money on than my career.

Guys,

You are over complicating things.....!



As an example, consider a bettor with an available fortune, or credit, of 243 (approximately 9 trillion) units, roughly the size of the current US national debt in dollars. With this very large fortune, the player can afford to lose on the first 42 tosses, but a loss on the 43rd cannot be covered. The probability of losing on the first 42 tosses is q42, which will be a very small number unless tails are nearly certain on each toss. In the fair case where q = 1 / 2, we could expect to wait something on the order of 242 tosses before seeing 42 consecutive tails; tossing coins at the rate of one toss per second, this would require approximately 279,000 years.

This version of the game is likely to be unattractive to both players. The player with the fortune can expect to see a head and gain one unit on average every two tosses, or two seconds, corresponding to an annual income of about 31.6 million units until disaster (42 tails) occurs. This is only a 0.0036 percent return on the fortune at risk. The other player can look forward to steady losses of 31.6 million units per year until hitting an incredibly large jackpot, probably in something like 279,000 years, a period far longer than any currency has yet existed. If q > 1 / 2, this version of the game is also unfavorable to the first player in the sense that it would have negative expected winnings.

The impossibility of winning over the long run, given a limit of the size of bets or a limit in the size of one's bankroll or line of credit, is proven by the optional stopping theorem.[2]

i would stress that these days i find the horses to hard to study aye,, never use to be like that

duh! it's because probability starts again on the next day

duh, so if the next race is 3.50 why not just assume the "day" starts at 3.50 instead of midnight.

I think we've been netted LordBobbin.

Feck,  in all probability it won't be the last time!!!

I never liked cat people anyway..

Nice bit of angling there Martinch

Why ?

Classic Coolhand,classic