On the Chase

1% of betfairs customers win over 15k per year tells you all you need to know, in reality its practically impossible long term or even medium term. I bet on tennis and Horse racing occasionally football but the fact is I do it for fun with small stakes,some weeks I am up some I am down but I am under no illusions that I can make it pay! There have been months on end when I have withdrawn up to about 500 euro in a month but form that again I end up putting most of that back in over the next few months.
I would say that overall its true that I am up but really just by a small amount, I dont consider myself a mug punter either, I look for the value that you speak about but the only real winners are betfair and the 1%(likely arbers) I mentioned earlier.

people that post  "discuss" at the end of threads are annoying

1% is what it is,  the figures dont lie,

No matter what system of staking plan or discipline you may use, on a yr on yr basis only that 1% (could be 1.5% but no more than that) will win over 15k on Betfair, its not about re-inventing the wheel here,its pure maths and thats the reality.

Do you honestly think that the figure of 1-1.5% is gonna change? It simply wont. Now if you are part of that top group then well done,if you are not and you think you can be part of it then also good luck,but dont delude yourself in the meantime and end up losing tons of cash in the process!

I do believe however that while only a small amount of bettors or traders will win a lot of money,there are plenty of shrewd punters who can make more modest amounts but still nice money to win.

Sadly Contrarian I feel you are absolutely right!

Whilst I don't believe you can ever win long term by chasing, as to coin the well worn phrase at some time the market will stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
But also I do not agree with Contrarian's belief that the markets will become impossible to beat except by a very few, well-honed professionals.
Sports betting is so riddled with subjectivity and consequent mis pricings, that there will always be opportunities even for those doing their betting the old fashioned, non technological way.

One starting point is knowing the losing/winning run. Has there ever been say 10 consecutive winning favs? or 50 losing ones ? We know the average strike rate and the average odds. we know the deviation and many other things.

All completely irrelevant. It really is very simple: if your bets aren't value, then long-term you will lose.

Lets just re wind a bit.

Betfair odds especially near the top of the market are practically the same as the long term strike rate - yes ? so the house edge is just the commission. That is what we need to beat.
Plus a bit of course

now its my turn not to understand you !

if the odds reflect the probability then of course you can win ! you win on the up part of the deviation of the odds by getting your losses back. Its when the deviation is too small to allow this eg roullete. In bookmaker markets the deviation is well known as are the odds and the frequency.

lets say that your average odds are 2.85 which is a strike rate of 35%

as soon as you hit 37% whch you will because of the deviation then you will profit by a given amount.

over 100 bets you bet £50 when you hit 37% you will have made £100. Roughly won 3250 lost 3150

I think thats right

ffs mate. how many times.... forget roulette !

blimey o'reilly

it aint rocket salad !

yes I agree, strike rate = value (and in my view the most important component as value is only quantified after the event as Ive said)

I checked my example and it is correct give or take a few quid.

. . . and if you are using 'strike rate' as synonymous with 'value', then how can you reconcile these two remarks:

  value is subjective and cant be quantified until after the event.

and

In sports the strike rates of the various elements are known

!!

Then let me make things more straightforward for you.

There is only one way to win at betting, whether it be sports betting, casino games, poker, or whatever. And that it is bet at value (=defn betting at odds which imply a lower/higher (backing/laying) probability of the event in question occurring).

If, as you imply in your opening post, you think that BF prices are nearly always extremely accurate, and/or, you yourself are unable to spot when they're not accurate, then no staking plan, or analysis of 'strike rate' will help you. You will lose.


Perhaps when you say this:

In sports the strike rates of the various elements are known. It is not random like a roulette wheel.
we know how often horses win etc and we know their prices. They always come back to the average in a given time scale.

So why cant (or hasnt) a martingale type system be developed using these known documented variables

you mean that we can somehow profit from the fact that the run of successes/failures will revert to the mean? And that predict that there will be some such reversion, using a staking plan to profit from it?

Variations of the gambler's fallacy

Some researchers believe that there are actually two types of gambler's fallacy: Type I and Type II. Type I is the "classic" gambler's fallacy, when individuals believe that a certain outcome is "due" after a long streak of another outcome. Type II gambler's fallacy, as defined by Gideon Keren and Charles Lewis, occurs when a gambler underestimates how many observations are needed to detect a favorable outcome (such as watching a roulette wheel for a length of time and then betting on the numbers that appear most often). Detecting a bias that will lead to a favorable outcome takes an impractically large amount of time and is very difficult, if not impossible, to do, therefore people fall prey to the Type II gambler's fallacy.[14] The two types are different in that Type I wrongly assumes that gambling conditions are fair and perfect, while Type II assumes that the conditions are biased, and that this bias can be detected after a certain amount of time.

Another variety, known as the retrospective gambler's fallacy, occurs when individuals judge that a seemingly rare event must come from a longer sequence than a more common event does. For example, people believe that an imaginary sequence of die rolls is more than three times as long when a set of three 6's is observed as opposed to when there are only two 6's. This effect can be observed in isolated instances, or even sequentially. A real world example is when a teenager becomes pregnant after having unprotected sex, people assume that she has been engaging in unprotected sex for longer than someone who has been engaging in unprotected sex and is not pregnant.[15]
Relationship to hot-hand fallacy

Another psychological perspective states that gambler's fallacy can be seen as the counterpart to basketball's Hot-hand fallacy. In the hot-hand fallacy, people tend to predict the same outcome of the last event (positive recency) - that a high scorer will continue to score. In gambler's fallacy, however, people predict the opposite outcome of the last event (negative recency) - that, for example, since the roulette wheel has landed on black the last six times, it is due to land on red the next. Ayton and Fischer have theorized that people display positive recency for the hot-hand fallacy because the fallacy deals with human performance, and that people do not believe that an inanimate object can become "hot."[16] Human performance is not perceived as "random," and people are more likely to continue streaks when they believe that the process generating the results is nonrandom.[17] Usually, when a person exhibits the gambler's fallacy, they are more likely to exhibit the hot-hand fallacy as well, suggesting that one construct is responsible for the two fallacies.[18]

The difference between the two fallacies is also represented in economic decision-making. A study by Huber, Kirchler, and Stockl (2010) examined how the hot hand and the gambler's fallacy are exhibited in the financial market. The researchers gave their participants a choice: they could either bet on the outcome of a series of coin tosses, use an "expert" opinion to sway their decision, or choose a risk-free alternative instead for a smaller financial reward. Participants turned to the "expert" opinion to make their decision 24% of the time based on their past experience of success, which exemplifies the hot-hand. If the expert was correct, 78% of the participants chose the expert's opinion again, as opposed to 57% doing so when the expert was wrong. The participants also exhibited the gambler's fallacy, with their selection of either heads or tails decreasing after noticing a streak of that outcome. This experiment helped bolster Ayton and Fischer's theory that people put more faith in human performance than they do in seemingly random processes.[19]
Neurophysiology

While the representativeness heuristic and other cognitive biases are the most commonly cited cause of the gambler's fallacy, research suggests that there may be a neurological component to it as well. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has revealed that, after losing a bet or gamble ("riskloss"), the frontoparietal network of the brain is activated, resulting in more risk-taking behavior. In contrast, there is decreased activity in the amygdala, caudate and ventral striatum after a riskloss. Activation in the amygdala is negatively correlated with gambler's fallacy - the more activity exhibited in the amygdala, the less likely an individual is to fall prey to the gambler's fallacy. These results suggest that gambler's fallacy relies more on the prefrontal cortex (responsible for executive, goal-directed processes) and less on the brain areas that control affective decision-making.

The desire to continue gambling or betting is controlled by the striatum, which supports a choice-outcome contingency learning method. The striatum processes the errors in prediction and the behavior changes accordingly. After a win, the positive behavior is reinforced and after a loss, the behavior is conditioned to be avoided. In individuals exhibiting the gambler's fallacy, this choice-outcome contingency method is impaired, and they continue to make risks after a series of losses.[20]
Possible solutions

The gambler's fallacy is a deep-seated cognitive bias and therefore very difficult to eliminate. For the most part, educating individuals about the nature of randomness has not proven effective in reducing or eliminating any manifestation of the gambler's fallacy. Participants in an early study by Beach and Swensson (1967) were shown a shuffled deck of index cards with shapes on them, and were told to guess which shape would come next in a sequence. The experimental group of participants was informed about the nature and existence of the gambler's fallacy, and were explicitly instructed not to rely on "run dependency" to make their guesses. The control group was not given this information. Even so, the response styles of the two groups were similar, indicating that the experimental group still based their choices on the length of the run sequence. Clearly, instructing individuals about randomness is not sufficient in lessening the gambler's fallacy.[21]

It does appear, however, that an individual's susceptibility to the gambler's fallacy decreases with age. Fischbein and Schnarch (1997) administered a questionnaire to five groups: students in grades 5, 7, 9, 11, and college students specializing in teaching mathematics. None of the participants had received any prior education regarding probability. The question was, "Ronni flipped a coin three times and in all cases heads came up. Ronni intends to flip the coin again. What is the chance of getting heads the fourth time?" The results indicated that as the older the students got, the less likely they were to answer with "smaller than the chance of getting tails," which would indicate a negative recency effect. 35% of the 5th graders, 35% of the 7th graders, and 20% of the 9th graders exhibited the negative recency effect. Only 10% of the 11th graders answered this way, however, and none of the college students did. Fischbein and Schnarch therefore theorized that an individual's tendency to rely on the representativeness heuristic and other cognitive biases can be overcome with age.[22]

Another possible solution that could be seen as more proactive comes from Roney and Trick, Gestalt psychologists who suggest that the fallacy may be eliminated as a result of grouping. When a future event (ex: a coin toss) is described as part of a sequence, no matter how arbitrarily, a person will automatically consider the event as it relates to the past events, resulting in the gambler's fallacy. When a person considers every event as independent, however, the fallacy can be greatly reduced.[23]

In their experiment, Roney and Trick told participants that they were betting on either two blocks of six coin tosses, or on two blocks of seven coin tosses. The fourth, fifth, and sixth tosses all had the same outcome, either three heads or three tails. The seventh toss was grouped with either the end of one block, or the beginning of the next block. Participants exhibited the strongest gambler's fallacy when the seventh trial was part of the first block, directly after the sequence of three heads or tails. Additionally, the researchers pointed out how insidious the fallacy can be - the participants that did not show the gambler's fallacy showed less confident in their bets and bet fewer times than the participants who picked "with" the gambler's fallacy. However, when the seventh trial was grouped with the second block (and was therefore perceived as not being part of a streak), the gambler's fallacy did not occur.

Roney and Trick argue that a solution to gambler's fallacy could be, instead of teaching individuals about the nature of randomness, training people to treat each event as if it is a beginning and not a continuation of previous events. This would prevent people from gambling when they are losing in the vain hope that their chances of winning are due to increase.

YUP ...I agree ....but Lex is stating that by backing all horses at set odds " can somehow profit from the fact that the run of successes/failures will revert to the mean? And then predict that there will be some such reversion, using a staking plan to profit from it?"

Each race has nothing to do with "reverting to the mean"...and should be bet on based on the value on odds for the horse selected to have a better chance of winning than the odds etc

So using such "reverting to the mean" reasoning is in effect treating situation like a coin toss ....where no edge exists.

Lex : There has been many a topic regarding 'value'.

But the general consensus is that value is subjective and cant be quantified until after the event.

Yes, I've heard that said many times, but personally I believe the general consensus to be wrong.

Commission coming into your example?

Just me reverting to be mean

why dont u give the system u are thinking of a shot here in the forum?

Ive got an idea of how to do this, so I shall give it a go myself for a while. I need to study the results and prices and see how much they fluctuate and how long it takes to return to the average. Best that I make a fool of myself in private rather than on here !

To put the article in the link another way - we're not looking for value, we are waiting for it to happen.. and its no fallacy because it isnt so random