Risk free after all.......

Just a quick post to say that I’ve managed to lay off a few bets so that my exposure is zero!

I don’t intend to lay off any more bets until after round 2 (I will leave a speculative lay on Mackenzie though), so let’s hope for a charge up the leaderboard from Will Mackenzie!

I wish I found trading on horseracing this easy…….

My current bets are:












Apologies, the original returns I posted below were net of double commission!

The first bets.....

My first attempt at trying to generate risk free bets for this week’s US Golf tournament didn’t quite go according to plan.

I initially picked out 3 players which I thought were overpriced. For £2 or £3 stakes, I backed them and asked for odds a little lower. I managed to get all 3 of my bets matched quite easily which was pleasing.

I then got a little greedy and tried the same trick with another 5 players with £3 or £5 stakes!

Not surprisingly, I struggled to get all of them matched and I’m left with an exposure of £11 going into the tournament tomorrow.

Below are the returns that I have generated for each player:

As the tournament progresses, I will look to reduce my exposure if possible. Obviously, I’m hoping that one of the 3 players with the high returns gets off to a decent start and I can lay him off quite quickly.

As I’ve said previously, I don’t expect to get rich by following this sort of strategy but this is meant to be an experiment after all, so I’m happy to look around at different strategies and give them a try for small stakes…….

The Expertiment has started.....

I made the decision tonight to get the ball rolling with this project as I’m fed up waiting around. I’ve also decided to look to trade and gamble on other sports as well as horseracing. Obviously, this may prove a stroke of genius or may be a desperate attempt to make this project work, only time will tell.

I’ve a little bit of knowledge of golf which was built up from playing a fantasy golf game last year. Therefore, I’ve decided to play the USPGA golf win market every week.

I have 2 distinct strategies that I will use on weekly basis:

Ø I will lay Tiger Woods every week he plays. This is simply due to the fact that I think he represents poor value every time he plays.
Ø I will look to generate as many risk free bets as possible before the tournament starts. This is quite easy to do on outsiders in the golf markets. I am looking for one of my risk free bets to win over the next 52 weeks to generate me a profit.

Lastly, thanks for all the votes in my poll. Thinking back, I should have made the poll something like “do you think I will make a profit over the 12 months?” as it’s clear that confidence in my ability to make a profit is pretty low.

Just for information purposes, the final results of the poll are:

<£10k – 27 votes (73 %)
£10k - £20k – 7 votes (19%)
£20k - £30k – 1 vote (3%)
£30k + - 2 votes (5%)

I personally voted for £10k - £20k and nothing has happened yet to change my mind. I’m hoping that I can prove a few people wrong but time will tell!

I’ll try to post up the free bets I’ve generated for the golf (if any!) before the tournament starts.

I won’t start trading on the horseracing now until Monday next week, but I’m looking forward to it already……….

Final Practice Day - Another Disaster

Firstly, apologies for the length of this post as I’ve a feeling it could be very long but I have a fair amount to write this morning.

As you can tell from the title, yesterday didn’t quite go to plan (again!). I’ll quickly get the loss amount out of the way as it’s a fairly large loss. In total I lost £47 yesterday! I gambled on 31 races (I don’t intend to do this every Sat by the way – just playing around at the moment!), 10 wins, 20 losses and 1 break-even. For my strategy to work, I need to win in around 60% of races although I'm aiming for 70%. Clearly, a 32% win rate is very poor and has to lead to a large loss. The summary:





Over the course of my training on Betfair, I’ve lost around £140. That’s an average of £28 per day of gambling, so it doesn’t make very good reading.

So, what happened yesterday? I think to be able to fully understand the context of this loss, I need to make clear what strategy I actually employed. Clearly, if someone lost this amount from trading, they would have a problem. However, I didn’t actually lose much from trading. I lost all of it from Dutching and from bad lays when I was trying to trade.

Being honest, I got off to such a bad start yesterday, I should have quickly accepted the fact that I was going to have a losing day and then look to minimise the loss as much as possible. Instead, I did try to chase losses slightly to some extent and things didn’t improve too much.

My strategy yesterday involved me Dutching on nearly all of the races with a little bit of trading thrown in. One point I feel I need to make is what I mean by trading. When I refer to trading, I effectively mean gambling on odds movements. Trading is probably a misleading term as I’m not trading in the sense that other’s do (such as Leon). I’m basically placing back and lays into the market and hoping for 1 or 2 point swings. e.g 7 to 5, not 7 to 6.6! Clearly, this increases the risk and returns greatly.

So, I’ll quickly give an overview of how yesterday went…… (I kept detailed notes for my own post-mortem)

(I did an analysis of the 6 races below before racing as I wanted to get off to a good start!)

1.50 New – I decided to dodge The Whisperer. It was being ridden by Rose D who I’m not a huge fan of. Also, it was its first run of the year and I noticed Dobbin had another ride in the race. I Dutched 3 in the race (Alli, Hock and Uno). Loss of £6.57.

2.00 Ling – Clearly a 3 horse race as the betting knew. I didn’t want to Dutch all 3 as too short a price. I decided to take the Hills horse with the best backed horse in the race (whatever it proved to be). Always Bold was well backed so I plumped for that one. Loss of £3.50.

2.05 Kemp – Disaster in the 3rd race of the day. Pigeon Island was easily the most exposed horse in the race. It had the form in the book but surely it would come up against an improver? I laid Pigeon for £2 at 7 (subsequently backed to about 4!). I Dutched 3 in the race and none were in the first 3 in the race! I did manage to reduce the loss by placing a small back on Pigeon in running. Loss of £8.16.

2.15 Chep – A huge gamble on a horse called Krackatara. Didn’t fancy it myself, so Dutched another 3 in the race. Loss of £3.09.

2.35 Ling – Dutched 3 but none in first 3. Loss of £1.80.

2.40 Kemp – How I lost on this race I’ve no idea! I didn’t like Hobbs Hill, so looked for alternatives. Thought Lead On and Pur De Sivola were best bets. I should have just laid Hobbs Hill but no, thought I’d Dutch the other two. Pur De Sivola had Hobbs cooked at the time but fell when Hobbs fell. Left Oslot in the lead and Lead On hampered when Pur fell. Loss of £2.

So, after the first 6 races or so, I had a loss of £25.

I then had lots of small wins and losses (mostly wins tho) before disaster struck again twice in 2 races (although the Newcastle race was well after the Lingfield race)

4.15 Ling – It was 15 minutes to race time. This race only concerned 1 horse, Dansant. Looked a class apart and would probably win. I was shocked when I checked it’s odds on Betfair. Was about 2.9. This was a competitive 12 runner race and I couldn’t believe how short it was. I put a lay in the market for £10 at 2.8. I was happy enough to gamble that it would drift out as it was too short.

Checked odds just before off. Trading at about 2.2! I’d also had a look at the race in depth and decided that Dubai’s Touch was overpriced at about 9. So, put £2 on this and took my medicine on Dansant and placed a win bet at £2.2 for £10. Had a £9 liability on this and £16 profit on Dubai’s Touch. Dansant beats Dubai’s Touch by a head (was value for more). So, a £9 loss.

4.05 New - Not a huge fan of Striking Article as too short a price for what it had done. Sweet on Kalahari King and a few others. Dutched 4 in the race trying to get a £5 profit but somehow, no idea how, managed to miss Riguez Dancer. Was 3rd favourite and all I can think is that I missed it somehow…..

Riguez pips Kalhari King by Neck. Riguez was only 8/1 so it should have been one of my Dutching selections. Loss of £6.07.

At this point, I then decided to stop Dutching and just start backing horses that were value on Betfair (overpriced compared to starting price). I was looking to generate some riskfree bets for £2 stakes. I chose 2 horses in each race and after I’d backed each horse, I’d put a lay in the market. Again, my luck was out and I had 6 £2 losses in 7 races!

I’ve used this strategy a number of times on Betfair and it’s usually fairly easy to generate riskfree bets. In 3 of the races, the horse I’d backed walloped the first the 1st or 2nd fence and was never going to shorten or it started very slowly at Lingfield. The closest I got was in the 4.45 at Lingfield. I had £40 profit on Mr Lambros which was just beaten. At that stage, the £40 would have put me in profit for the day!

Lastly, the day ended with another loss. The biggest of the day! In the 5.05 Newcastle. This was purely down to some research I’d done a few years ago on Bumpers. Basically, horses who win their first bumper are always terrible bets to follow it up next time. Obviously, lots of horses do win their first 2 bumpers but over the course of the season, it will generate a loss to level stakes. I think the main reason is that the horses are always very short to follow up.

I was brought up with the saying “If you’ve missed the wedding, don’t attend the funeral”. This meant that if the horse won its last race at a decent price; don’t back it to follow up at a much lower price. This saying has definitely left its mark on me as I’m always put off horses which have won their last race. Obviously, sometimes I’m wrong but I’m sure it’s a profitable strategy over a sustained period of time.

So, we had a horse in this race which had won its last race, Touch of Irish. It was against a Howard Johnson horse bought after running in an Irish Bumper for a huge amount of money. I put £10 on the second fav and it was well backed just before the off. I didn’t watch the race but the favourite won quite easily. As an aside, I’m sure that there may be something wrong with the Howard Johnson stable at the moment as I’ve noticed a few of their short priced horses have been getting beat too easily for my liking.

Overall, another disaster of a day on Betfair for me. I’m thinking of changing the sub-title of my blog to “the story of a gambler who blew £15k on Betfair in 12 months!”

One thing that struck me today is that I seem to have developed a great knack of having a large risk exposure when I lose and only a small risk exposure when I win! Clearly, if this continues, I’ll go bankrupt quite quickly!

I’m starting to think that Saturday’s may not be my lucky day. I’m hoping that once The Experiment starts, I’ll do better during the week. Time will tell.

Lastly, I’d like to say thanks for all the comments and support. In particular, thanks to Andrew for the advice lately. I’ve been having some email correspondence with Andrew to try to develop my betting strategy and so far, it’s helped get my thinking a bit straighter although today was a large loss, so I’ve got a fair bit to learn.

I’m going to have a week off from The Experiment blog this week as I’ve got to get my continuous assessment coursework finished for my professional qualification by the end of this week. Once I get this out of the way, I’ll be able to concentrate my efforts on trying to make The Experiment work although at the moment, I’m struggling to see where I go from here………….. back to full-time work in a month?

The Final Countdown.....

Well, I'm pleased to say that I now have a start date for The Experiment.....

The Experiment will start on Saturday 1st March 2008.

I was informed at work this afternoon that my proposal to decrease my working hours has been approved. It has been agreed that I can get 4 afternoons off every week to allow me to carry out The Experiment. I will start at 8am for my 4 short days and finish at around 12.45pm. This will allow me to get home and start trading on Betfair. This will start from the 3rd of March.

I will continue to work for one full day a week and if possible, I will try to make this a Monday although work committments will dictate what full day I have to work. I'm not a huge fan of Monday afternoon racing as it's usually quite poor quality and I would imagine that liquidity on Betfair would be quite poor.

One point that I should make is that I do intend to gamble on evening racing in the Summer where possible, so I will have sufficient opportunites to carry out The Experiment. I don't intend to gamble on Sunday's as this will be my only day off.

I already have agreement from my bank that I can borrow £15k to fund The Experiment, so I'm all set. Once I receive my £15k capital, I will deduct all of the costs for The Experiment and let everyone know how much my starting bank will be. As I've said previously, my bank will never be fully exposed but I will use all of it if I need it.

My next practice day will be on Saturday again when I'll be trying to implement what I have learnt so far from my previous practice days. Unlike my other practice days, I'll be trying harder to make a profit as I'd hate to think that I'm starting The Experiment without ever having made a daily profit from trading on Betfair!

Keep voting by the way. I'll stop the vote when The Experiment starts and I'll comment on the findings.....

Practice Day 4 - Trading in Running

Well, I think this is the day that I finally completed my induction to Betfair as I looked at trading in running. I’ve never really spent much time on trading in running during my Betfair training as I didn’t see why it would help me out my with my betting strategy. I don’t think I could have been more wrong…….

Before I discuss what I learnt today, I better cover the subject of profit and loss. As I keep reiterating, I’m not caring at the moment how much I win or lose and simply due to this reason, I decided to keep my stakes down to an absolute minimum today. I played with £2 stakes all day. Subsequently, I didn’t need to add to my current Betfair balance of around £15. Obviously, this limited my laying opportunities but I’m not a fan of laying and then backing, so it’s not a big deal.

I played in 34 races, winning on 10, losing on 5 and breaking even on 19. I chose not to opt for a hedged profit on most of the races as the profit would have been less than 50p in most cases. Obviously, if I was trading with £500 stakes, I would be taking the hedged profits but I’m not too bothered about profit/loss at the moment, so I didn’t waste my time trying to earn a profit. Overall, I made a loss of £2.15 across the day which is not really indicative of the day’s gambling but I’m not too bothered. Apologies if this annoys some people reading this blog but be assured that I am totalling up my ‘training’ losses as I go and I will include these in my returns from The Experiment.



So what did I learn today?

Well, I definitely felt a ‘Eureka’ moment at one point this afternoon. As you know, I’m still trying to work out what betting strategy I plan to implement during The Experiment. So far, all I know is that I’m going to use a Dutching technique with a bit of trading thrown in which I hope to reduce the risk exposure of the Dutching. Well, I think I found the missing piece of the jigsaw today…….

During my first 2 practice days when I was learning to trade, I was always closing out my trades as soon as the race started. As you know, this resulted in some hefty losses and a bad first experience of trading. However, one of the things I pointed out was that there were numerous horses where I had created a liability on due to my poor trading skills. However, the horses then went on to win the race. Clearly, if I had let the liability run, I could have laid it off in running quite easily for a decent hedged profit but I didn’t know about this at the time.

When I was practicing my Dutching last week, as I said, there were numerous times when I could have laid off some of my Dutching selections quite easily before the race started. This comment obviously applies to laying off the horses in running also. There were a few times when my horses were a very short price during the race and I could have laid them off. Again, the key is to know when to do this but with more practice, this would get easier.

Today, I was trading a little bit before the races started and when my bets were not matched at the off, I chose to let them stand. I was absolutely amazed at the number of times that they were matched within 30 seconds of the off. Obviously, I could have then hedged to get a profit but I didn’t bother in most races. I just moved onto the next race.

So, I think there you have it. A betting strategy has evolved before your eyes. All I need to do is Dutch, trade before the off and trade during the race. Clearly, I need to develop trading strategies to ensure that I minimise the Dutching risk exposure and increase my profits in the best possible manner. I have the option of trading the Dutched selections to increase my profit on these selections or I can choose to Dutch the horses which I haven’t backed in order to minimise the risk. A trade-off between the two is probably the way to go but I’ll give it more thought.

Clearly, combining trading and Dutching will make the Dutching calculations much more difficult but I should be able to manage them OK. Time will tell……

Next Saturday will be the first day that I will attempt to implement my betting strategy for The Experiment. I will also increase my stakes again, so it should be more fun than today!

Lastly, I should hopefully get a date from my work this week concerning when I can reduce my hours. I have also had confirmation from my bank that my £15k betting bank has been approved, so I will get my hands on this money soon also. As soon as I have this money, I will effectively be able to start The Experiment for real. I may choose to start The Experiment even though I’m still working full-time as I can look to gamble in the evenings and at weekends until my hours are reduced. Whatever happens, I’ll keep everyone informed through the blog……

Quick Update

I’ve been off work sick for much of this week, so it gave me some more quality time to think about how this project is taking shape. Unfortunately, I was far too sick to even think of playing around on Betfair but I did get to watch a fair bit of racing and take some notes on new ideas for The Experiment.

In summary, I’m quite pleased with what I’ve learnt from my brief Betfair experiences so far, so I’m still as keen as ever to give this project a go. I still haven’t received a date from my work yet as when I will be able to start this project and I seem to increasing my workload by the day, but I’m still looking at a start date of the beginning of March sometime.

Thanks again for all the comments over the past week and the encouragement and support for what I am planning to do over the next 12 months. I think that I’m maybe coming across as having a ‘screw loose’ which was definitely not my intention when I started this blog but I’d like to answer a few of the comments and suggestions that have been posted over the past week.

Firstly, I don’t ever intend to be fully exposed to losing my £15k bank at any point of this project. I think I’m starting to worry some fellow bloggers with my intentions to start with a £15k starting bank. My current day-to-day role involves me analysing and pricing different types of insurance risks, so I’m not exactly risk-loving in my nature!

I originally wrote that I would be splitting my £15k into 3 banks of £5k and I would only be exposed to losing £5k at any one time. After taking on board various comments from fellow bloggers, I agree that I was maybe setting the bar too high to begin with. I now intend to start with 15 individual £1k banks at the start of this project. This will obviously limit my earning potential somewhat at the beginning of The Experiment, but I can adjust my bank accordingly as my experience increases. If I lose my first £1k, I will start again with my 2nd £1k and so on. Obviously, the plan would be to not lose my first £1k but this all depends on what betting strategy I'm implementing at the time and how quick I can learn about Betfair.

One of the key points that I think may have been missed by some readers of the blog is the fact that I’m not doing this project in my spare time. I am planning on giving up around a ¼ of my job for 12 months to allow me to carry out The Experiment. This obviously has severe financial consequences for me and must be factored in to the cost of this project. My girlfriend and I currently have a mortgage of circa. £140k which is a large mortgage for a 24 year old and a 26 year old, so we will definitely miss a ¼ of my salary!

I hope this may also help some people understand why I have chosen to borrow £15k and not £5k for this project. Being honest, it would be great to give up a ¼ of my work and sit in the afternoons learning to play on Betfair with £2 stakes until I’m comfortable with what I’m doing. However, I wouldn’t be able to earn enough to make it worth my while and the whole project would be pointless. Therefore, circumstances have dictated that I need to play with larger stakes and that I need to earn a decent amount for the project to be deemed successful. As I’ve said previously, if I don’t turn over a £10k profit in the 12 months, I struggle to see how this project can be judged as a success from my point of view.

One of the things that I’ve picked from the comments is that I think people wish I was gaining more experience of Betfair. Being honest, I wish I was gaining more experience but it’s very difficult for me at the moment. I’m currently working full-time which means I am out of the house from 8am-6pm Monday to Friday at the moment. I have upcoming exams for my professional qualification in April and I’m spending all my spare time in the evenings doing my continuous assessment course and studying for these exams.

It has been suggested that I could practice my trading skills on the evening racing but I honestly don’t have the time. At the moment and until The Experiment starts, my only opportunities to practice on Betfair are at the weekends (only Saturdays really as I like to spend Sundays with my gf!). Therefore, I’m more aware than anyone that I am going to be starting this project off with absolutely zero Betfair skills and zero confidence in my trading ability. However, my lack of practical experience is not getting me down.

One thing that may not be apparent (or maybe it is?) is that I have put a lot of thought into how I can make this project work for me. I’m not the sort of person to do something without doing my homework first and when I first discovered the way that Betfair works, I started to do my homework. I have been reading and sleeping Betfair manuals for around the last 6 months and have built up a very good theoretical knowledge of how Betfair works. Clearly, trying to implement what I know in practice is the very difficult part but time will tell if I can manage it.

On Saturday, I intend to dabble into the world of trading in running for my next practice day. I’ve read lots on this and would like to see how things work in practice. I’m having some issues with my internet connection at the moment and it has been proving painfully slow, so this may well put a dampener on my attempts at trading in running but I’ll no doubt learn more after Saturday.

After Saturday, I will have practiced Trading before the event, Dutching and Trading in running which completes my repertoire of things I wanted to practice before The Experiment starts, so I’ll be raring to go……….

Keep voting by the way. My confidence is at all time low........ It's becoming a little skewed towards the <£10k for my liking!