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The Festival Has Arrived!

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It’s here! The first day of the festival has arrived and as I write this I’m looking out over Cheltenham and the hustle and bustle of the place. Bin men, people going to work, buses and cars driving about but not a single item of tweed in sight!

I’m pretty sure, everyone going to the festival is still in bed! We were out last night and there were plenty of festival goers supping ale and talking about who was going to win what. There’s always an air of optimism before the first day and it was great to see so many horse racing enthusiasts in one place. There will certainly be a few sore heads out there, this morning!

If you’ve never been to the festival before, then one of the first highlights is walking up Evesham Road toward the course. The atmosphere is incredible. It’s the same as walking to the stadium on a big match day. There’s the touts, buskers, burger vans, people handing out flyers, free scarfs, flags etc. Everyone is excited and the air is filled with optimism. The second highlight is arriving and walking into the Guinness village. Yes, a whole area devoted to the black nectar. The trick here is to stand by the bins! It’s easier to get a pint and you can get to the rails and watch the races a lot quicker.

Anyway, we’ll be heading to the course at 11.30 am to take in all of the sights and sounds. I’ve got all of my bets placed and have cash in hand to get money down on course. It’s always worth trying to get to the rails bookies where Hill’s trades as these are the first pitches and it’s where you can witness people placing £10,000’s. I’ve often seen people with 10K in £50 notes getting on a favourite. A spectacle in itself!

So, with the excitement brewing, it’s time to take stock and think about the plan for the day. I’ve covered my thoughts in previous articles and you can read those on the blog. I’ve outlined my best bets of the day, below –

13:30 – Kalashnikov each way

14:10 – Saint Calvados win

17:30 – Testify each way

Plus a double on the two odds-on favourites.

All bets have been placed and some more money will be placed on course.

I’ll be back on Thursday with a look back on the first two days and another look at Gold Cup day. Until then, be lucky and enjoy the festival 🙂

Compounding And How It Works

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We’ve had a few support tickets through over the last couple of weeks about how compounding works, what is it, how it works and more importantly does it work.

In today’s short article I’ll go through the mechanics of compounding and how best to use it.

So in essence, compounding is a way to increase your betting bank at an accelerated rate. We start with a sum of money and then increase our stakes with our profits. There are two ways that we can do this.

  1. Instant compounding
  2. Interval compounding

 

So let’s look at number 1 –

We start with a bank of £1,000 and have a 2% stake for each selection. This would mean £20 per bet. With this method, we always use 2% of the bank regardless of our position. Let’s say our first bet loses, our bank would stand at £980. Our next bet would now be £19.60 and so on.

The other way and we’ve backed a 5/1 winner with our first bet. We would now be at £1,100. The next bet would be £22.

There are a few variations on the above and some people will always stick to the original stake size whilst the bank is in the negative. When they start to hit a profit they then up the stakes accordingly.

Method number 2 then, Interval compounding is my preferred method.

Same as above we start with a £1,000 bank and stake 2%. We keep betting at 2% no matter what happens. When we have increased the bank by 20% we then compound this profit and up the stake in line with the bank. So, in this case, we would now have £1,200 having made 20% and the stakes would now be £24. We wait for another increase of 20% (on the original bank, so another £200) and then our stakes become £28.

Here’s the sequence in 20% increments –

BANK SIZE STAKE SIZE
£1,000 £20
£1,200 £24
£1,400 £28
£1,600 £32
£1,800 £36
£2,000 £40
£2,200 £44
£2,400 £48
£2,600 £52
£2,800 £56
£3,000 £60

 

So basically with each interval of £200, you increase your stake by £4.

There are many variations on the above but that should give you a good idea on how the main principles of the method work.

Starting With A Small Bank And Growing It

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For those of you that follow my weekly ramblings, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of patience and discipline.

These two virtues need to be applied to our money management that I keep banging on about and needs to be enforced from the outset. One way we can instil this within ourselves is to save up for our betting bank.

A friend of mine actually gave up betting and quit for a whole year while he saved up and worked on his portfolio. He’s now one of the most successful bettors out there.

By showing you have the discipline to save money, not spend it and build up a bank will hold you in good stead for when you do go eventually live. It also means that once the bank is in place it won’t affect your monthly income. This in itself is also paramount to your success. One of the many pitfalls of betting is that people mix it with their monthly income and this adds more pressure. By having a separate bank you release the pressure of not having it attached to your current outgoings etc. By viewing that bank as a long-term investment and with a view to releasing profits from your investment you’ll be much better off.

Even if you don’t have much money you could stick a tenner aside each month and after a year you would have £120. Following the advice in these articles and working out your stake size you would then be able to build that small bank up and by compounding the profits you’d be surprised at how it can build up.

Here’s an example:

£120 invested –

Your approach/system/tipster shows a strike rate of 25% from the paper trading you’ve done. In working out your stake size we know that a 25% strike rate would result in up to 24 consecutive losers. We multiply this by three to protect the bank and divide this number into our £120. That’s 24 x 3 = 72. Therefore £120 divided by 72 = £1.67 per bet.

After the first month, we’ve made 30 points profit. That’s 30 x £1.67 = £50.10 + £120 = £170.10

We now compound this so take the £170.10 and divide by the 72 = £2.36 is our new stake size.

Realistically you will of course have losing months but let’s assume that we average 30 points profit on winning months and lose 10 points on losing ones. We have 2 winning months followed by a losing month. Look at the compounded bank over the course of a year below:

Month 1 = £170.10

Month 2 = £240.90

Month 3 = £207.40

Month 4 = £293.80

Month 5 = £416.20

Month 6 = £358.40

Month 7 = £507.80

Month 8 = £719.30

Month 9 = £619.30

Month 10 = £877.30

Month 11 = £1242.70

Month 12 = £1070.10

I appreciate that is a fairly simple example and betting can be more volatile but it serves to illustrate how effective compounding your bank can be. That £120 has turned into just over a £1000 in a year which is incredible. Were you to carry on with that for the next couple of years you would be making 10’s of thousands a year and all from £120.

Have a look into it and think about how you could grow your bank even further. Once you’ve found that reliable method and worked on your bank sizes etc you can look into compounding your betting and grow your bank even bigger.

If you like the idea of growing your bank in the way above you seriously need to check out the service below….

Visit Odds On Bankers

Is This Tipster Right For Me?

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Visit Nap Investor

This week I’ve uploaded a brand new video that shows you how to find out if a tipster is right for you before subscribing to them. I’ve created a calculator at the bottom of the page that you can use after watching the video.

IS THIS TIPSTER RIGHT FOR YOU CALCULATOR

Click on the link above to download your calculator and see if a tipster is right for you.

As always if you have any questions let me know.

Eddie Lloyd

Visit Nap Investor

How To Win At Doubles

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This week we’ve no video but a look at a better way of placing a double bet. It’s a question that I get asked a lot and a question I always answer the same. DON’T DO MULTIPLE BETS.

However there is a way of enhancing our chances of landing a double bet (the lesser of two evils when it comes to multiples!) should we choose to place such a bet.

There is a bet that is called block betting and the bookies don’t publish it because it’s not in their interests to do so. This block betting is a very old method of placing a bet that can still be struck today and although many a cashier in your local bookies won’t understand it, it is perfectly legitimate.

So how do we go about constructing such a bet.

Let’s say that we have two races of which we want to bet in. Usually you would select your two horses and place a double.

Well you’ve done it many a time before and either one has placed and the other won etc. You know the score. But what if we could cover two horses in both races.

We have our two fancies in each race but we also think that there is another horse that could outwit us.

So we now have two horses in each race. We need to perm this as you’ll see in the photo below:

slip 2

By placing two horses in the same race we enhance our chances of landing the double. This of course will cost us extra but it’s not too much of an extra and we have a better chance of hitting the double.

So how does this work?

Any one from two means that we are asking the bookies to allow us to have one horse from the two selected in each race. I have shown this in the explanation below –

2.10 Wolverhampton –

Horse A

Horse B

2.40 Wolverhampton –

Horse A

Horse B

Any 1 From 2 in a double.

Staked as 2 chances in the first leg multiplied by 2 chances in the second leg. This breaks down as follows –

Horse A from the 2.10 can win and so can Horse A from the 2.40 (this is one bet)

Horse A from the 2.10 can win and so can Horse B from the 2.40 (this is one bet)

Horse B from the 2.10 can win and so can Horse A from the 2.40 (this is one bet)

Horse B from the 2.10 can win and so can Horse B from the 2.40 (this is one bet)

As you can see we are covering four outcomes in two races and this is the best way to optimise our stakes.

Have a go at finding races where you fancy two contenders and find if this way of betting will work for you.

I’ll be back next week with how we can do this with trebles and may even film a video of how I place the bets online.

Eddie Lloyd

The Man In The Green Dressing Gown….

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There’s a gambling story that crops up every now and again about a man in Las Vegas and we thought it had a good moral to it. Would you think you’d lost half a million or just a tenner?

Here’s the story –

A young gentleman and his wife were on honeymoon in Las Vegas and were both keen roulette players. Having saved up $5,000 to have a week of betting and living a decent life in the Nevada desert they went about their leisure activity with great haste and after the first three nights were flat out broke in terms of their betting bank. They had a few dollars left to enjoy food and drink and the wife being the reasonable one stated that they spend the rest of the week enjoying more simple pleasures. (If they exist in Vegas!!)

On the fourth day the groom found a ten dollar chip on the floor of his hotel room and whilst his new found wife was showering he decided to place a bet for the fun of it. Entering the floor he thought of his hotel room number where by his wife was still showering. Number 12.

He placed $10 on number 12 on the first roulette table he came across and to his surprise won $360. He attracted a lot of attention with that win and in the excitement of it all let the number ride. $360 on number 12.

It came in again!

He now had $12,960 in his possession. Amazing he thought. The pit boss came over and told the gentleman that he’d not be able to let it ride again as the table limit would be exceeded so he’d need to move on. Unable to find a table that would stand his bet the gentleman moved on to another casino further on down the strip.

He was still receiving a lot of attention and assumed that word had got out that he’d won a lot from a small stake of $10.

Arriving at the next casino he managed to find a table that would accept a stake of $12,960 on the one number. He stuck with his number and went with 12.

It came in again.

He now had $466,560 in his hand in chips. He’d had loads of attention before he walked in but now he was the centre of attention.

He wanted to ride it again.

The casino pit bosses pulled together and looked at the man. At this point they had heard of how he’d come into so much money and decided to let the bet stand on number 12.

The wheel spun with the potential of the casino having to pay this man over $16 million should it come in. You can hear the ball dropping from here…

clink…clink…clink…clink… “number 17”

He’d lost the lot.

Absolutely gutted he had to walk back to the hotel and explain to his new wife where he’d been all night.

Walking back to the hotel he couldn’t believe how many people were still staring at him. How did so many people know that he’d won so much money but come away with nothing?

He arrived back to the hotel room and told his wife he was sorry for having been so long.

She asked where he’d gone?

“I found some money and thought I’d have a spin on the roulette whilst you showered,” he said.

“How much did you lose?” she asked.

“Oh, only $10” he replied.

“Oh that’s okay,” she replied,

“I hope you didn’t lose that $10 in your green dressing gown though, that would be shameful.”

And there you have it. Shameful that he was wearing a green dressing gown or that he lost nearly half a million dollars?

The moral of the story here is that it doesn’t matter how much you’ve won make sure you keep yourself in reality and check yourself. Once we make a profit let’s not decide to give it all back! Especially when we’re still in our dressing gowns!!

Is This Too Complicated?

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Have I overcomplicated this?

That’s a question I often get asked when helping people with system development and betting in general and if I’m honest it is a question I often ask myself!

You see sometimes we do have a tendency to overcomplicate things, not just in our approach to betting but also generally in life.

“Focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple”

The above words were spoken by Steve Jobs and couldn’t be truer, especially when it comes to our betting. So what the hell am I on about, the man that wrote about Archie scores and has a habit of bombarding you with all the maths required to be successful!?!

It’s the approach, not the method I’m getting across here.

I was in America a few years back and whilst in a bar in New York, watching multiple sports channels aligned across every wall, I got chatting to a group of guys keen on sports betting and what they call the beautiful game of baseball. Upon asking them how they did in terms of profiting they complained that despite picking plenty of winning selections they made no profit.

Upon delving a little deeper it was all to do with their approach that was losing them money, not the method.

They understood the value and admitted to only backing teams when they thought the sportsbook had got it wrong about the likeliest winner. They knew the sport inside out and had a full understanding of how the lines and odds worked. They were also selective about what they backed. Sounded perfectly simple to me and I wondered why they made no money.

Turns out they had no separate bank, altered their stakes all the time and didn’t always back their opinions, instead, following the media!

So looking at the whole picture it was obvious that their selection process was spot on. Very simple but grounded in their knowledge of the game. The thing that was cocking it all up for them was over-complicating the approach to the whole thing.

I left them in the bar with several bits of advice and they thanked me for sharing it. Will they go and profit? I’ll probably never know but as long as they have a separate bank, keep to level stakes and only bet when they think it’s value then they should make a profit as we all should.

Of course, this rarely happens as we have a habit of over-complicating things!

Have a think about it and try to simplify your approach to betting in general and if you’re reading this on an iPhone or Mac then you’ll understand that simplicity is the way forward as Steve Jobs would have said 😉

Buying Value – A Simple Way To Find It….

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When you buy something, for example a car, you want to know that you’re getting value for money. One garage has your dream car for £15,000 but down the road another garage has the exact same car for £13,500 you would obviously buy it from the second garage. It is exactly the same when striking a bet. We need to get the best odds as possible as we would get the best price possible for the car!

Learning about creating something called a tissue can be a very difficult thing to do but these tissues are a way of determining if we are getting value about our bets. When you look at the Racing Post in the morning and you see the SP forecast betting at the bottom of the card, this is basically an experts “tissue” and his opinion on how the market should be priced up.

Understanding a tissue though requires an understanding of how odds translate into percentages. It’s not as difficult as you may think and we’ll run through an example now.

Let’s take the price of 6/4. This equates to a 40% chance of the horse winning the race. We calculate the 40% by always dividing the left number of the fraction by the right hand number and then adding one. So 6 divided by 4 = 1.50 plus 1 = 2.5. We then divide 100 by the 2.50 and this gives us 40%.

A very simple way to construct your own tissue is to trust the experts and do an average of the betting forecasts SP’s. You can go over to the Racing Post, At The Races, Sporting Life and Timeform and you’ll be able to find the forecasts. What you need to do is to find the average of each forecast about the horse you fancy. For example you fancy the favourite in a race and four forecasts from the above websites have odds as follows:

13/8, 6/4, 6/4 and 11/8. We now convert these into percentages like in the example above and you’ll see the figures below:

13/8 = 38.10%

6/4 = 40%

6/4 = 40%

11/8 = 42.11%

We add them all together and then divide them by 4 to find our average which would be 40.05%. We can be fairly sure now that our horse has a 40% chance of winning its race.

We now have 40% about our selection so of course we want to find some value. We go over to the markets and find a bookie offering 13/8 about our fancy. You can now strike your bet as you’ve just “bought” your horses chance of winning the race for less than you have worked out it should be!!

We believe it’s 40% but we can strike our bet at 38.10%. That’s finding value. If we can find a horse that we believe has a higher chance of winning than the market suggests then we are betting to value and will therefore make a profit on the long run.

Trading Made Simple

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Today I wanted to look at and re-visit how trading works and what a simple process it is once we know what we’re doing. I think a lot of punters are put off because there’s a certain amount of effort required in order to make it work.

I want to quote someone I spoke to recently about the subject and it made me smile because it’s so true!

‘The downside to trading is that you have to spend so much time in front of the computer’. You might as well say ‘I make great money from a well-paid job but the ‘downside’ is that I have to spend eight hours a day in an office to get it’.

Now I’m not suggesting that we have to spend eight hours a day trading but to some degree we do have to spend a certain amount of effort in making the “game” pay.

So let’s simplify what trading is and the way we should look at it before we put that “effort” in.

Like anything in the betting world, it’s a numbers game. This doesn’t have to be overwhelming or complicated it’s quiet simple maths once we’ve understood it.

Let’s use an example using the old and understood principle of buying and selling. I have tried to lay this out in a simplified manner –

We back a horse at 9/1 in the market first thing in the morning for £50.

The 9/1 needs to be seen as a percentage. These odds state that the horse has a 10% chance of winning. So in theory we’ve “bought” the horses chance of winning the race at 10%.

Later in the day we see that the horse is now 4/1 in the market. We can now “sell” its chances at 20%, double what we “bought” it for.

The horse wins and we pay collect our profit of £450 plus the £50 staked.

We layed the horse at 4/1 so we need to pay out £250.

Our profit should the horse win would be £250 (this is before commission of course).

However should the horse not go onto win then we lose our £50 stake but as we layed it off we get to keep the other punters £50 (that punter “bought” the horses chance at 20%) meaning we have lost nothing.

So I hope that you can see, trading is simply buying and selling a horses chance within the market.

There are now so many ways of trading that it can all seem a little overwhelming. One of the most popular forms and one that I use on a daily basis, is in-running trading. This is where we back (buy) the horse before the race and then lay it off (sell) it at a greater chance once it’s off and running.

I have published a video below of me trading pre-race to give you an example of how with a little bit of effort you can be making money from trading. It is a little cringy to watch as it was one of the first video’s I ever made so with a deep breath here it is –

I hope you enjoyed watching the video and got something from it. Please leave any comments below and I will get back to you.

So in the video you saw me trade on the second favourite in the 16:20 Windsor. To arrive at this selection I simply went to oddschecker and clicked on the relevant market. Scrolling down the screen I looked at the pie chart at the bottom and looked for the horse that had received the most bets as you’ll see in the image below –

Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 21.37.24

So Calm Attitude was the most bet on horse and was steady around the 10/3 price. This enables us to take one tick profits within the 5 minutes before the off.

I hope you enjoyed the video and if you have any questions please leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Regards,

Eddie Lloyd