Most bettors can't tell the difference between bad luck and bad picks β€” I built something to find ou

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Joined today and gone tomorrow.
Hopefully

Czech scent.

Pigs B0ll0X

Fair point and I take that on board β€” I can see how it reads as an ad and that wasn't the intention but I understand why it landed that way on a first post.

I'm a developer and a bettor and I built this primarily to solve my own problem of not knowing whether my selections had genuine edge or whether I was just running hot. I genuinely didn't know whether to share it here or not for exactly this reason.

What I'm actually looking for is honest feedback from people who know Betfair and BSP properly β€” whether the LVI methodology makes sense, whether the way I'm measuring edge is the right approach, and whether anyone else has found it useful to track their bets this way. If the answer is "this isn't useful" or "this has already been done better elsewhere" I'd genuinely rather know that.

If sharing the link was the wrong call for a first post, noted β€” I'll earn that right. Happy to just discuss the methodology if that's more appropriate.

Listen to no one….best advice.

If you don't bet the right horse, the price is academic.

That is quite possibly the most boring opening post I have ever read on here....I did manage to get to line 4 before thinking "walofs" however

One's own personal betting records are gold dust. Literally invaluable, because you literally cannot buy that information. I remember D Nevison once being quoted as saying that he didn't keep betting records - as long as there was more money coming in than was going out, he didn't need them. That works until the day more money is going out than coming in. When that happens, without records you have no way of investigating whether it's just one of those things, so plough on the same way and wait for things to turn; or whether your edge has gone and there are bets you need to change or eliminate to turn things around.

One of the very first things I did when I went full-time in 1990 was to keep track of my winning bets against SP. Season one (I only did the jumps in those days, and started in November 1990) ended with a profit of Β£15,843.33, minus the expenses from going racing of Β£2330.90. Great stuff. I spent the next two months on the beach itching for the first Saturday in August and Newton Abbot. But if I had bet at SP, my profit would have been only Β£7129.46. Take off the expenses and it looks shakier. Would I have been confident of carrying on full-time with those numbers? Which tells us:

1) If you don't take the right price, the horse is academic; and

2) Comparisons with SP are a good way of deciding whether you are on the right track, a good way of giving yourself confidence that you are ahead of the game. I'm not 100% convinced that BSP is necessarily as good a comparator as the old industry SP was 40 years ago. Forty years ago the industry SP was a distillation of everything - vast sums of money bet both off-course and on-course - while the BSP now is the result sometimes of less than Β£100,000 matched pre-race on here. And that sum is effectively a lot less than it sounds because of the weird way the exchanges calculate matched amounts. But it's still better than the corrupted industry SP we have to put up with these days.

The breakdown of bets against odds-range, racecourse, etc., which the OP offers is very useful. That is the sort of information which turns things around when you trawl through your records after a bad run. But I'm not sure whether electronically retrieving that information is going to lead you to spotting all the trends which a manual inspection turns up. All my records are handwritten in notebooks; I literally have no idea what a "spreadsheet" is: I have tried googling the term and I still can't find an explanation or a definition, so the OP's offer is not for me. And even if it were, I feel that I would never find the gold dust which manual trawling of records has turned up over the years, because so much of that gold dust only emerged when I was looking for something else entirely and instead found myself observing trends which I would never have thought of investigating.

But then again, I clearly have no idea what what you can actually do with a spreadsheet. So, good luck, to the OP. I think he is onto something useful.

FWIW
Back in the day before BF when there was a proper SP and no IR, there were stats/systems based on SP/Fav/2nd Fav etc.
My point always used to be that SP = starting price, and therefore everything was based on data after a race had started and therefore unable to place a bet.
It is similar with BSP, but it is accentuated by the sometimes big price movements just before the off.
My observations are that there is often a sizeable movement in the second between the suspended price and the BSP going live, which applies both ways.
My guess is that it is connected to the volume of back and lays bets in the market.
What I am trying to say is that you don't know what BSP is until the race has started, and therefore if it represents the value you are looking for on that bet.
There is lots of historical data on Adrian Masseys site, which uses both SP and BSP, so you can compare that if you wish.
Over the years I have spent a lot of time "studying" data and looking for an edge, which became very time consuming and I would have earned more pulling pints behind a bar.
When I was a small business start up advisor, one of my "things" was how much per hour will you earn for all the hours you will work and is it worth it?
These days I'm predominately a simple +0.5 goals better on soccer when I have an odds edge - all I need is one goal.

Whatever the possible merits of the OP,the fact remains that it is a flagrant breach of BF Forum Rules

BSP does have many flaws, Rigsby, particularly with late suspensions at the off, and even more particularly over jumps. Something which gains an advantage when the tapes go up, or starts slowly at the back, will plunge or drift in price enormously in that split second and affect the BSP disproportionately. But what else is there to use as a data point these days? Not the absurd Industry SP, that's for sure; even heavy losers probably beat that.

I have found that the really valuable information comes from comparing your own prices with results. For instance, are you winning or losing backing or laying the horses you make favourite on your own tissue? Ditto for outsiders. Gives you an insight into your own psychology, and whether you might be over-cynical about favourites or too pessimistic about the rags. That information really can turn things around for a losing backer or a layer.

The opening post is reminiscent of the good old days on the General Betting forum.

Shame about the spam - but otherwise an excellent post, that (back in the day) would have stimulated an interesting and worthwhile discussion.

Screaming - I totally get your post about the benefits of a good old fashioned pencil and paper but you'd have been an even more frightening proposition for bookmakers (imo) if you'd ever got your head around excel & spreadsheets.

@management - agree

One further point before I head off to the footy #mot, is the effect on prices from the "tips" of influencers who have a social media following. Not a subject I am an expert on but it makes it harder to understand whether a price movement is from this type of thing or real money.

2 very good posts Screaming. Im like you, never did excel or spreadsheets at school on account of computers hadn't been invented. So i have everything jotted down on A4 refill pads. Always gets a laugh in Home Bargains when I announce to my Mrs rather too loud that i need a new pad.
Regarding bfsp, I find that you dont have to beat bfsp to make a long term profit. In fact, the lower the price I take, the bigger my ROI.
I have recently started to put my figures for the day/week/month through Google AI,which is able to calculate my totals far more quickly and is able to quickly show stats for price brackets, types of race etc

yesterdays racing was a classic example. I had 30 bets and made 1.4 points profit. I had 11 other bets on horses whos odds dropped significantly lower than the odds id already taken and those bets made 6.7 points of profit with a much greater strike rate.

if you wish to know if your bets are bad luck or bad picks, just increase the sample size. Losing after 100 bets could be bad luck (variance), losing after 500 bets will almost certainly be a result of bad picks

I think that could be a problem with the OP's offer, Tiger. It enables real-time, effortless analysis of your results, so you are inevitably going to be spotting trends long before you've had enough bets to be sure the trend is not just down to luck. And that is going to have an effect on your betting before the truth has become established.

With pen and paper, on the other hand, you are inevitably going to wait longer to start looking for information, simply because it requires more effort. Basically it will be sheer weight of numbers which have alerted you that something might be going on and that it's worth looking at. So you don't start looking at the data until you have enough data to make your investigation valid.

One of the key driving factors behind creating this app was to help people identify good and bad tipsters.

I often see tipsters who shout the loudest have the biggest following - often tipping short priced horses and BOOM'ing when they win, sharing bet slips with hundreds or even thouands staked. In reality these kind of 'tipsters' would not help most people make profit. They might tip a horse at evens but the BSP is 6/4 - BSP might not be perfect but it is the fairest refletion of the market. You wouldn't take getting paid out even money on a coin flip if the chances of it happening weren't actually 50:50.

I see one tipsters posting 5/6 bets per day, most of whom tend to drift in the market and he BOOM's when one of them wins at low odds.

I myself followed some 'value tipsters' for a while as well - a lot of them can be very good and generally share their full bet history. The issue I found was that I could not get the odds they were sharing either because I didn't bet quick enough or didn't have access to the sites they used. This meant even if I backed all their selections, in the long term I wasn't seeing profit because I wasn't getting the value they were.

My aim was to help normal users get a better understanding of their bets and how they are shaping up for long term profit and loss - yes you can abolutely make long term profit without beating BSP, but its the best indiciation.

I appreciate lots of the thoughts and comments on this post so far

Also completely agree on the sample sizes pointed out by some in this thread. The app does state when sample sizes are too low to be a true reflection and that any fluctuations at these small sample sizes will just be variance. In August for example I placed 281 bets and finished -217. I beat BSP 74% of the time by an average of 17%. The app helps me understand that my selections were generally good and that I had an unlucky streak which is perfectly possible due to variance

Also completely agree on the sample sizes pointed out by some in this thread. The app does state when sample sizes are too low to be a true reflection and that any fluctuations at these small sample sizes will just be variance. In August for example I placed 281 bets and finished -217. I beat BSP 74% of the time by an average of 17%. The app helps me understand that my selections were generally good and that I had an unlucky streak which is perfectly possible due to variance

Gaze used to make me laugh, claiming he had a system with a 40% ROI. But when I asked over what sample size he say "14". Pros make around 5-10% Roi long term,(hundreds of bets) which is a slow steady grind usually. Thats usually too slow for the average punter who wants to get rich quick.

9 bets today, +2.9 Thats 32% ROI, which is unsustainable long term, but most punters would regard +2.9 as not worthy of their time.