@takethestand "Winners count more, again as long as the price is reasonable."

If you are averagely lucky at picking winners, isn't that just another way of saying the price must represent value? It doesn't have to be the best value in the market, but it has to win more often than the odds you are getting. If you could pick every winner you could take odds of 1.01 and make a fortune, but if you were only right 99% of the time those odds would suddenly now only be break-even for you. I'm guessing by "reasonable" odds you mean backing "winners" at odds like 2-1 rather than at odds on.
Let's say you only backed horses at 2-1, but not every single horse at those odds, just the ones you fancied. Clearly then if your horses won more than once in three times then you would have chosen the horses that were the better value than all the other horses priced at 2-1. Like buying a used car for £500. It might last you years, or it could be a jalopy - the offered price may be the same but the value is different. If you can spot the difference then you are spotting value.


@ Dr Crippen "Yet you can't even explain why you don't simply back horses that drift in the market when these types obviously provide the best value."

Not sure if this is really your view or just your interpretation of someone else's view, but it's erroneous.
It's true to say, in the absence of new information, that a horse that drifts becomes better value, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it ever becomes good value, let alone the best.

In case anyone doesn't get that - imagine there's a bookie who knows that 20% of his punters like to bet on long shots and the rest all try to pick their value winner and won't bet if the odds across all five serious runners seem a bit mean. He could make up a book of the 5 runners that each had reasonable chances of winning against each other - the overround on that book could be exactly zero and he could move the prices around to ensure his net position was neutral, so, barring a miracle, 80% of all of his punters' money would effectively end up just being redistributed amongst themselves for no profit to the bookie. Yet also in this race is a no-hoper which none of his "smart" punters would go near. He prices this one up at 40-1, but only a few people back it. At 50-1 quite a few more back it and when he nudges it up to 60-1 he gets the rest of those 20% of punters that only like long shots. The real chance of this horse winning are more like 1,000-1 or worse.  Assuming punters of either group bet on average the same stake per horse regardless of the odds, he would most of the time make 25% profit (from the 'dumb' punters) on the amount of all the smart punters' money. As he's offering odds lower than 100-1 on a 1000-1 shot he could put aside a few percent of that profit as an emergency fund in case the nightmare should happen. After less than 100 matches he would be well covered and still have a good margin of profit on every race. All the serious runners in this scenario are "fair" value (like getting even money on a coin toss), and even though the long-odds runner went from long odds to even longer odds it remained a poor value bet the whole time, as it simply had virtually no chance of winning.

What's missing from this discussion, or at least hasn't been specifically classified as such, is the concept of "outcome value" versus "trading value". Many a time you can back something with a microscopic chance to win and make a decent profit if you can sell the bet when it's market=assessed chances temporarily increase to merely miniscule.

How do you know it wins before the race Dr....

Are you backing a lot of drifters but refusing to divulge your strike rate....

You talk a load of bull because everything you say is unsupported...........

Where did I write that anything should win peckerdunne?

Can you point out something I've written that needs support?

aye robot,

Last year Betfair were looking into removing the 1 second bet delay and were asking for opinions on the forum. I would be interested to hear your views about how this would affect your bots and if you would be in favour. Thanks.

while her bank goes from 3K to 100K your bank goes from 3K to £0.00.

yep, this is how it is.

Intuitively it seems more likely that IR markets enter into abnormal states more frequently and significantly than pre-race. There are more drivers for players to play irrationally e.g. 'I'll correct my error--and not lose to that horse!', 'I'll get on that at any price', 'that will win--I'll pile on at 1.01'. We have all seen, even at one-second refreshes, overbroke books with two horses contending for the lead both trading at 1.88 or so. A very ready-to-hand or rudimentary instance of what Aye Robot does might be to lay both of them to the same sum.

I have a pre-race tissue before most markets are priced up i.e. just after final decs and it's a major input in deciding which bets I strike.

Bookmakers are calculating value in every runner though. They are estimating probabilities and if they are not good at it will go out of business.

They need to know what a value price is in order to offer a shorter one.

Last year Betfair were looking into removing the 1 second bet delay and were asking for opinions on the forum. I would be interested to hear your views about how this would affect your bots and if you would be in favour. Thanks.

Sorry J.B. Just saw this.

In all candour - without the 1 second delay I believe I would clean up, probably to the detriment of the average player. That said, the delay has an upside for me too which is that it acts as a barrier to entry to less sophisticated automated players, it's not in my interest to see the field get too congested - so I can't say what the balance of that is.

As regards the manual player; it's hard to know what the effect would be because the interplay of all the different factors is so complex. I imagine that it would be good for the handful of +E.V. players of all types but might exacerbate the difference between them and the great mass of -E.V. players. No one really know though.

Sorry I can't offer a clearer answer.

Picture the scene; you and your bookmaker friend are in the Sahara with no phone coverage, and there`s an even-money poke you want to back. Your friend says he`ll lay you 1.1. Do you;

a) Tell him what he can do with it?
b) Take the 1.1, as a winner`s a winner?

Anyone denying that value is everything, anyone answering `b`, really should give up hope of ever being a winning punter.

So how did you calculate that the even money was value?

what a winning player looks like

Most of the ones I've seen are either charlatans or rich men losing a fortune a bit at a time.

As the Dodger once said when asked about others he's seen down the years who try to make it pay. He said ''they come and they go.''

Which says it all.

From what I understand Tony Bloom's setup (Starlizard) is a whole different scale from that lot - they did seem impressive though. There are a few of those operations around, I've met some that employ full time scouts going to games all over the world to collect a level of data that you just can't get otherwise. I think it's quite a tough way to operate as it means your costs are so high. A lot of those groups seek external funds (even Starlizard does) which always makes me suspicious because I don't see why that should ever be necessary. I don't know how the operation in the doc is funded.

I thought the Sole-trader football guy was completely credible but he was putting in a lot of work, seems to me like you might as well just do a normal job as do that. Like I said the Dogs guy left me unconvinced. You don't expect a professional player to be phased by a few consecutive losses, which he certainly appeared to be. I'd be surprised if he was making substantial amounts of money.

£550

And if you're not aware of this series with betting, it's generally interesting stuff. Other pro's interviewed include Alan Potts, Eddie Fremantle, Nick Goff.

https://www.starsportsbet.co.uk/betting-people/

I would have thought any pro would consider 5 losing races in a row as something that will inevitably happen from time to time, and that it would be no big deal as their staking plan would minimize the losses, and that their edge would recover those losses and more in due course.

A lot of pros would be happy if their losing runs were only in 5's.

You've honestly got a lot to learn DC.

By the way you talk on here I very much doubt that, DC.

You're thinking of Mike Spence rr

https://twitter.com/mikespence8?lang=en

When you take into account a lot of pros will be betting double figure prices,
I'm pretty sure losing runs of 5 will happen more often than not.
There is no point discussing with you. Goodluck, you'll need it!

Unless you're betting extremely short odds then losing five on the trot is nothing which may explain Drippen and his refusal to sensibly answer a previous question from pecker.