Tipping God?

Daily Loss £20.00

I’m not really sure how to start tonight’s post but as you can imagine, I’ve got a fair bit say. (The blog title is a quote from a reader on my last post, not my view!)

I’ll start off with 2 quotes I got from 2 readers in emails straight after the race today. It read “OK analysis there, well done.” It made me chuckle……

When I mentioned it to Andrew, he wrote, “What the hell do they want from you, the whole 20 runners in finishing order?” This made me laugh too. I replied, “no, they just want a bloody winner!”.

OK, the first point about today is that I lost 2 points and more importantly for me, I lost £20. The reason I didn’t back my horse for 1 point each way is that I’m not familiar too much with the place markets on BF and I wanted 8 but I couldn’t get matched, so I gave up asking.

I actually had £50 win at one stage with average odds of 32 but I traded in £30 at 23-26 pre-race. In summary, I ended up with £20 win at 42/1 which was about as much value as you can squeeze from a horse that started at 20/1. I couldn’t get the place odds to match my win odds, so I didn’t back each-way.

For anyone who is not aware, I decided to analyse the 2.00 at Redcar today. It was a 20 runner 2 year old handicap. This is not my typical sort of race as I prefer more exposed horses and Andrew wrote to me this morning asking, “why are you trying to unpick the most difficult race of the day?”

Basically, I feel like I have to use this month to prove to people that I know what I’m doing. I know there will be many people reading the emails everyday and being quite sceptical about what I’m trying to do. No one likes paying for tips and in the long-run, it would be much better to select your own horses. However, not everyone has the knowledge and time to do this, so I’m hoping that I can provide a service to these people ultimately.

When I was looking through the races last night, I remember thinking to myself, that would be nearly impossible to unpick. However, one saying I was taught was“ The bigger the field, the bigger the cert”. Andrew always laughs when I tell him this when I’m analysing 20 runner fields but it is so true. My edge in these races is absolutely massive.

Joe Punter has zero chance of picking the winner or understanding the form lines. Therefore, if I spend two hours or three hours looking at the race and unpicking the form lines, I can make it pay in the long run easily.

Anyway, so I decided to try to unpick that race last night. So you all know how long it took, I was studying in a room on my own for just over 2 and a bit hours. That got me down to the final 4 horses. I then stopped and waited for the odds this morning before trying to compute the horse’s chance against their selected odds.

As I’ve shown everyone in the past 2 weeks, the final bit of the jigsaw is usually the most difficult to fit into place. Narrowing the race down to 4 is the easy part. Getting the winner is the difficult bit.

Usually, I plump for the horse that is a high price but I was spoilt for choice today. My final 4 were priced at 20/1,25/1, 14/1 and 10/1. Now that’s what you call spoilt for choice!

As we all know now, I again messed up this bit of the puzzle. I plumped for the 20/1 chance which was the best value in my opinion.

Thankfully, I’ve had 2 very nice emails from Stan and Dan as well as the comments below from them and others saying that they backed all 4. I take my hat off to Stan as it appears he used the 4 horses for reverse tricasts and forecasts for 50p stakes and won over £1,300!

(The irony of this is that I personally hate permutation bets like this and I would never recommend to anyone to perm my horses in tricasts especially. The chance of anyone picking a tricast in a 20 runner handicap is up there with 5 numbers and the bonus ball in my opinion but I know many punters use them.)

Anyway, well done Stan and it makes me feel quite good to know that you won a few quid mate. My address is XXXXX and please make the cheque payable to Graeme Dand for my share mate!!! Just joking…..

Back to the post-race analysis…..The result of the race was the 25/1 won, the 10/1 was 2nd and the 14/1 was 3rd. These were the odds this morning. The SPs were 20/1, 8/1 and 14/1.

I hear everyone shouting “what the hell happened to your 20/1 shot?” OK, I have a few points regarding this horse.

As I made crystal clear in my email, there was a horse running in the race called Cutting Comments and it finished 4th at 25/1. On the formbook, my selection had 10lbs in hand of this horse today. As it turned out, my horse finished tailed off at the back.

Now, I don’t want to be a smart-ass here but clearly, my horse has not run anywhere near to form. I’d even go as far to say that if we assume that the 4th has run to form, then my horse would have won the race if it had ran to the same level of form it did when it faced this horse last time.

In simple terms, if my horse had run to form, I would have selected the winner and the 3 horses which followed him home. Now that would have been a good story to write about on the blog………

For the traders out there, my other 3 horses excluding the winner traded at 1.4, 2.26 and 4.2. At the off, my 4 selections started at odds of around 27, 11, 19 and 34.

Therefore, if you had followed my advice and backed at 30+ on Betfair, you would have been OK as long as you laid off IR at 5 or above.

I’m sure you are all wondering how Andrew used my analysis! As you know, Andrew likes big prices. He was spoilt for choice today and he backed all 3 of the big prices which meant he got the winner, 3rd and mines!

Due to the fact that they all traded at below 5 and one at 1.4, he managed to triple his profits on the race by getting all his low lays matched IR and he won a substantial sum. He then followed it up with backing a 40 shot in the next which traded low and winning another nice sum to have an absolutely fantastic day on the whole. Well done mate!!!!!

Overall, I think this race will go down as one of the best races I’ve analysed this year. Nice time to do it when I’m giving out a month of free advice in emails I must admit!

For those of you that lost today by backing my selection, don’t worry about it. I lost too! However, if I can keep narrowing races down to 4 horses with an average price of 16/1, in the long-run, not only will we do well, we’ll absolutely skin the layers and the bookmakers! Patience my friends, patience……..