Results:

Baroness Brittany - scratched.
Akers - unplaced
Boon Moon - $5.50 win, $2.60 place.
Houlihan - unplaced
Quasi Stellar - $9.20 win, $2.50 place. (Yeah!)
Silver Birch - $1.70 place (Equine Investor's five star beauty.)
Telbon Lotto - unplaced
My True North - third, NTD. (Blast!)
Gold Boom - scratched.
Nafir - $5.90 win, $1.90 place. (Lucky I double checked the selections or I'd missed this one.)
Grand Raj - unplaced.
Graces Roses - unplaced.
Prince of Revelry - unplaced.
Isim - unplaced.
Detari - $2.10 place.
Mystic Melody - $5.80 win, $2.00 place.

By my reckoning that's $70 outlay ($1 win, $4 place on 14 races) with a return of $77.60.

The system is $7.60 up after fourteen races.

If we'd added Placegetters wife's filter (see post above) we would have eliminated Akers and saved an extra five bucks.

Today's results - fortunately for me - illustrate what I see as all the best features of this hot little system. A good number of reasonably priced placegetters gets you by while you wait for a healthy share of winners and the occasional good one like Quasi Stellar, race 3 Moonee Valley, $9.20 the win, which I would never have selected in a million years. Who selected Quasi Stellar? And it isn't a one-off. This method gets winners like that often enough. Just check back through batches of old races and see. It surprises me.

I reckon you could expect one return like Quasi Stellar every one or two race days with this system. On a day to day basis you *should* be ahead two days out of three. And there is high fun value in this too.

And all with a selection system that is so simple George Bush junior could do it without having to hardly look up from his pretzels.

A couple of refinements:

*It wouldn't hurt to eliminate races less than 8 runners to avoid the dreaded NTD as in Doomben race 5, #2 My True North, today. It shouldn't upset the stats. On the other hand, you should be able to pick two horses in a field of seven. I don't think it matters, but NTDs really irk me.

*If you want to include a safety device, I suggest stop betting after four outs and only resume after a strike. The chances are that the strike you miss by doing so will be one of the small priced placegetters this system collects and missing it won't cost you as much as you saved on outs, and the chances are also that you'll collect the next winner after the one you missed because this system throws up its share of doubles (two strikes in a row). Maybe. I haven't tested this. Today you might have missed Quasi Stellar and picked up Silver Birch, or you might have missed Detari and picked up Mystic Melody, if these strikes had of been the resumes from the break.

In any case, in my sampling this system seems remarkably resilient against long runs of outs. It breaks up the runs of outs with lots of short priced placegetters. In my sample of 180 races there was one run of seven outs, two of six, none of five, three of four outs, three runs of three outs and twelve sets of two outs. That is pretty stable. A safety device wouldn't have saved you much. No doubt you'll hit runs of eight outs, nine, ten, etc. but again the sheer volume of placegetters this system gathers guards against it happening too often.

So I don't think spectacular and catastrophic runs of outs are the weakness in this system. More likely it will strangle you slowly with a slipping average return.

The good number of double strikes and triple strikes the system yields is promising for the apllication of various staking schemes that depend on doubles and triples. Then the system will either strangle you very rapidly, or it will show itself to be a true weakness in the fabric of horseracing that will get you rich with little effort. Which do you think it is?

And remember: Like all systems it is self-defeating. The more it succeeds the less it works. There is no solid ground. You push one side and the other side moves to compensate.

A good day. But I remember last Wednesday.

Hermes