My 2 cents worth which is probably worth about that (2 cents) as I have only been betting for 42 years, but I still contend that you have to be prepared to lose at least 1 bank! E.G. AT THE PRESENT I have a plan that is showing 86% POT on total stakes BUT, without going into details is showing one maximum bank wiped out in the last 2 years and another that is looking VERY serious , in fact it all depends on 2 races next saturday!
BUT, even with 2 banks wiped out I am still showing a reasonable profit overall, puts a slightly different angle on things though, don't you think???

Duritz,

You seem to be looking for a formula to guarantee you'll never lose more than a certain amount of your bank. It's a crock and no such formulas exists except beating the bookie over the long term. OK, so you want to make sure you can only ever lose a 1/3rd. of your bank? When you do, what then? Walk away from punting?

Most punters who just enjoy a punt on Saturdays, allow so much per week to punt with and divide it up for the amount of bets they have [don't knock them, it's cheap entertainment if the betting allowance is within their budget].

If however, the goal is to beat the races and using a betting bank, forget all the maths formulas and runs of outs garbage and leave it in the hands of the mathematicians here [there is at least one in this thread I know of ..Stebbo], or would be mathematicians here who enjoy that stuff. Just bet 2% of your bank each bet. It's a fairly acceptable and common percentage among Pro's and serious punters for very good reasons. $20 bet for $1000 bank and $2 bet for $100 allows for an awful lot of outs. Just round down to the nearest $1 or $5, depending on your bank size.

You'll either [very] slowly get rich ....or poor :-(

Perhaps you should offer your juvenile paternalistic advice to Dr William Ziemba, who I presume recently co-authored a pertinent book with William Benter.

I'm prepared to bet that Benter is not the most successful gambler in the world as whoever that might be would probably shun publicity, but most people would be content with Benter's Powerball equivalent a year.

http://finmath.stanford.edu/seminar...emba2004Win.ppt

Sing it with me...

"Duritz is always running around, trying to find, certainty..."

Re your post #30,
Risk of ruin calculator can be downloaded at www.twonix.com under the heading "punting articles" at left of page.

__________________
"Not winning on a horse that came first is one thing.....Losing on a horse that didn't come first is something else entirely!!!"

JFC,

does your simulator give you the longest run of outs as well? Putting that figure alongside the drawdown (which I shall assume is the maximum drawdown) might lend some credence or otherwise to Bhagwan's figure of 3.5

Cheers,
Chris.

Duritz,

my experience is that you simply can't use the longest run of outs (your LFLS) as a basis of deciding your stake. As I mentioned in the other thread, if your longest run of outs is 10, you might get 10 outs, get a $1.80 winner, and then get another 10 outs. You're now 18.2 units out of pocket, but your longest run of outs is still only 10.

If you do use the figure of 10, then your idea of only losing 25% of bank is remarkably similar to Bhagwans 3.5 figure... but I can tell you that you will very likely push the boundaries of your entire bank, not just 25% of the bank.

If you use a Maximum Drawdown figure, then you can safely bet to lose a much larger percentage of bank than your suggested 25%. IMHO, if you have a good idea of your expected MaxDD, then only banking to lose 25% of your bank is a little too conservative.

Cheers,
Chris.

Duritz,

Horse racing is part of the futures market. Not a place for the faint hearted and although we do our best to protect ourselves, certainty against failure will never be part of that market unless we never bet on it.

Hi jfc,
here is a spreadsheet you might find interesting, while your on the subject of Dr. Z.
If your interested the sheet can be adjusted to Aussie racing by deleting the bottom half and making a few adjustments in the top half of the sheet.
If you understand his work on the Golden section you'll get great benefits from the sheet.

Hmm, I'll check mine out tomorrow and put a longest run of losses into it, I've just finished a 1000Km drive so I'm not functioning well at the moment. I would have expected better agreement than that between our figures. But then after 1,000,000 bets with an expected return of 105.6% I would have expected the profit to have been closer to 56,000 each time.
How does yours work?

KV

Ah, I just got a maximum drawdown of 378.4 with yours on the fifth go and figures of 332.4, 260.4 and 255.6 with mine on three consecutive goes. Must be the random element.