"Well I've been doing successful burgs for the last 5 yrs and it's been quite profitable ... until now. Now I'm doing 2yrs. of porridge and re-thinking my life's strategy for when I get out."

Luck is a funny old cow.

STEVE, my 2 cents worth,...... I have a daily up-dated POT column , i.e. since the start of the system till NOW. To me that is the acid test because a system made 50% POT 3 years ago but is now 50% down so far this year is irrelavent (in my opinion) as it should be an on-going thing, I mean where do you draw the line 100 bets, 10,000 bets 500,000 bets?? where?

Kind of like when we hear that 30% of favs win ( near enough) we are talking about including all races since 1800 and something, if we started analysing that you could pick out "sections" that say something entirely different!

You will find that it's not so, the longest I found where the % was noticably less, was three meetings, where, in many people's opinion, the posted track conditions were grossly incorrect or different in patches!

The 30% SR of Favs is concideed to be a recurring factor in racing.

As punters the Holy Grail is a a process of creating selections which in themselves becomes a recurring factor.

Thats the hard bit .

Thats the Holey Grail.

No sooner that we feel that we have discovered the missing link, then the forever shifting sands takes its toll.

Bhags, I know EXACTLY what you're talking about, but that's just it; the 30% winning favs RUNNING TOTAL never seems to alter, i.e. even a ridiculous losing run hardly makes a ripple on the 30% S/R over many, many, many ,1000's of past results!

It all keeps coming back to something I saw once in an interview with a well known bookie in the UK, who said (QUOTE) "it doesn't matter what you do, any imaginable system or combination" the "shifting sands will ensure that you lose about 20% on T/O, why ? because you are being given about 80% (on average) of the true odds of ANY horses real chance of winning!!!!!!! foooooood for thought!

What we really have here is, someone spinning a coin and giving us 4-5, so you can bet every 2nd spin or every 10th spin or WHATEVER, WHATEVER, and you are still getting 80% of the the true chance???????

Result = you are going to lose 20% of every $ you bet! (eventually)