Introduction !

As regular readers will know, Graeme is flying off to the sun tomorrow morning and rather than leave his blog gathering dust, he asked me if I fancied stepping in to the breach and keeping it going, in his absence…

Whilst fully aware of his ulterior motive (he’s trying to break national records with his blog count !) I decided that there was little harm giving it a go – and so here I am…!

Firstly, an introduction: My name is Andrew Rigby and I live in a village just outside Loughborough in north Leicestershire. My hobby/interest/passion, for most of my adult life (and a bit before that !) is horse racing.

My first racing memory is of Comedy of Errors winning the champion hurdle in 1975; I also remember taking numerous Wednesday afternoons off school to watch the mid week ascot jumps meetings in the late seventies. However, I really got into the racing in the early eighties when Michael Dickinson was dominating the NH scene and the likes of Shergar, Posse and Time Charter, were stars on the flat…

During that time, I gambled a bit, just for fun. I had no particular edge, I just enjoyed trying to solve the puzzle of a race – and although winnings were not significant, neither were losses…

The first change in my gambling mentality came in the early 1990s, when I read a book called ‘value betting’ written by Mark Cotton, the founder of pricewise. I remember an almost ‘eureka’ type moment as the concept of value betting dawned on me. Since that point, ‘value’ has under-pinned every bet I’ve placed.

Despite feeling a greater degree of comfort in my betting, it still wasn’t particularly profitable. This was down to a combination of indiscipline and lack of time, a situation that continued until May 2006, when I ‘retired’ from work.
Although I was only 42 at the time, I was work weary. Trying to juggle the demands of 3 children (now 4 !) and the renovation of a house, in addition to work, saw something being short changed. As it was invariably work, I bit the bullet and resigned !

One side benefit of this was the fact that I could put more time into my racing. The prospect of earning from gambling, has always been quite appealing (due to the flexibility as well as the interest) and this provided me with an opportunity to see if would be feasible…
This said, gambling will always sit behind family responsibilities and (in theory !) house renovation – but it did provide me with an opportunity to focus on it more than ever before.

Up until February this year, I had made solid, if unspectacular progress along my path. Break evens, had become small winnings – and winnings were becoming more consistent.

In February, I ‘met’ Graeme (we’ve never actually met – but I’ve exchanged more notes with him than most of my lifelong friends !). My initial intention was simply to use my experience to help him clarify where he was going with his Experiment. However, an unexpected benefit of giving him my opinion of virtually everything was that it started to clarify my own thoughts – and as a consequence, my gambling performance improved considerably…

Small winnings, started to turn into quite big winnings and on a consistent basis. July was my most profitable gambling month ever. In truth, I still play with small stakes (but then again, so would you, if a fair number of your bets were placed with a screaming 3 month old child on your knee !) – and not all of my gambling is scalable. But, for the first time ever, I am starting to think I could make a living from this game…

As a mentioned earlier- my method/edge is simply ‘value’ betting and I will explain what I mean by ‘value’ in my next blog post…